It’s good to know some people just can’t be bought and Chris Tangey is one of them. He refuses to allow any part of his work to be used to “decieve” people.
Al Gore or someone in his team, really wanted the firestorm footage for his 24 hour televised special coming up this week (which Watts Up is matching hour for hour). One arm of his team (the Office of the Honorable Al Gore) asked Chris Tangey of Alice Springs Film & TV for permission to use the spectacular footage in late September, and Tangey said “No” it would be “deliberately deceptive”, which caused media stories around the world. Now another arm, The Climate Reality Project has quietly tried dressing up in their nonprofit-documentary-group-cloak and again offering money to secure the rights.
The full recent email exchange is below. The Gore team mean “no disrespect” but their representative Andrea Smith was still happy to insult people with names, and was perplexed, writing that ” the US is the only country in the world that has an active Climate Denier movement – every other country in the world has accepted this as a fact.” We can see how well informed Al’s team are about the skeptics.
Tangey doesn’t buy it for a moment: “Apparently “climate deniers” are people with a different viewpoint to yours, so are fair game to be labelled , put in a box and publicly pilloried. I would have though the correct scientific response would be to simply convince them of your argument.”
It’s not hard to see why someone who wants to scare people out of their dollars would find this footage appealing.
It would have been something to see. Apparently it was originally a man-made fire that had burned for ten days. The firestorm occurred on a cloudless day without a breeze… So nothing to do with man-made emissions, and not even a natural fire.
Hi Chris! Wasn’t sure if this is the same Chris who shot the fire tornado? But I was curious if Alice Springs Television still controlled the rights to the footage? I’m a producer working on some documentary pieces for a nonprofit organization doing an internet broadcast,and was wondering how much it would be to license some of the footage?Thank you so much for your help and time!Best wishes,
Quaas, below, is redefining the art of aging gracefully.
…
…
Johanna Quaas, an 86-year-old who has just entered the record books as the world’s oldest gymnast.
Displaying astonishing balance, strength and flexibility, she performed routines on the floor and parallel bars that would put someone decades younger to shame.
Steve Goreham, author of “Climatism” and his latest “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism” has compiled an handy set of quotes — ordered and sorted, just for that moment when you need something related to, say, ocean acidification, health effects, biofuels, Al Gore, carbon taxes, overpopulation, the UN, the IPCC, and more.
Steve holds an MS in EE and lives in Illinois. I have his first book on my desk: extremely well researched, well written, well laid out. Polished and professional. He is across so many aspects of both science and politics, like few others. An organized mind. I like it!
These people are called “progressives” (See Energy, other)
“If you ask me, it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.” —Amory Lovins, environmentalist, Mother Earth News, Nov.-Dec. 1977
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” —Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and Dr. John Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, 1970, p. 323
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.” —Jeremy Rifkin, environmentalist, Los Angeles Times, Apr. 19, 1989
On Money:
“He [Al Gore] impressed us all at Deutsche Bank Asset Management. We invited him to an internal meeting in April 2007 during which we discussed the issue of climate change extensively. A few months later, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his commitment. We then created a fund that invests in companies that position themselves as climate-neutral. Within two months almost 10 billion dollars flowed into this fund. Can you imagine? 10 billion! There has never been such an overwhelming success.” —Kevin Parker, Director of Global Asset Management, Deutsche Bank, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Nov. 15, 2010
Looking at the current round of successful grants. How do you beat four out of five candidates for funding? Here’s one successful method:
Step One: Use statistically insignificant results obtained by dubious techniques to generate a paper with conclusions that grab headlines.
Step Two: Make sure these “results” support contentious Labor Party policies, and actively promote the spurious conclusions in the media prior to publication.
Step Three (optional): Possibly go on to publish the paper, then again, maybe not.
Step Four: Apply for more money.
Apparently the ALP need to find budget savings from the science program to deliver their promised “surplus”. They are thinking of a grants freeze — which is a good way to create uncertainty and encourage the best researchers to leave the country. Here’s another idea, they could stop funding inept activists and just use science grants for scientists.
The man ultimately responsible for the use or misuse of taxpayer dollars through the Australian Research Council is The Hon Chris Evans. It is time he explained how research by scientists who break laws of reason, and have a record of producing unscientific, illogical, and incompetent research get funding, when most researchers miss out and when the ALP is supposedly cutting wasteful spending.
Could ARC grants sometimes be used as a soft form of government advertising, disguised as research?
Case I: Define scientists who oppose a government policy as “pseudoscientists”, research ways to discredit them
Information seeking, cognition, and individual differences
$138,000 for 2013
$100,000 for 2014
$100,000 for 2015
Total $338,000.00
The public now has access to vast amounts of scientific knowledge and information on the internet and in other new media. Paradoxically, this increasing availability of knowledge has been accompanied by the increasing traction of pseudoscientific misinformation. This project explores the reasons underlying those trends and seeks solutions.
Define pseudoscience: Is it the unscientific pronouncements of activists who think that computer models and internet polls are scientific “evidence” about our atmosphere? Is pseudoscience the practice of claiming that there is overwhelming evidence, but being unable to name any? Is it science to call other scientists names? Can Lewandowsky define his use of the word “denier” in any scientific sense, and with accurate English?
Case II: Provide good marketing opportunities for government policies
How do you beat four out of five applicants for funding? Is it by announcing results loudly in press releases which promote government policies, but which turn out to be based on a tiny sample, with non-statistically significant results, using a technique that was not as described and embarrassingly having to withdraw the paper? Is your work of such a high standard that unfunded volunteers took only three weeks to spot holes in it, holes that $300,000 and three years of study by expert peer review didn’t notice? Tick, Yes.
DE130100668 Gergis, Dr Joelle
The University of Melbourne
The further back we look, the further forward we can see: 1,000 years of past climate to help predict future climate change in Australia.
Reconstructing 1,000 years of Australia’s past climate will greatly extend our understanding of natural climate variability currently estimated from weather observations. For the first time, Australian climate variations over the last millennium will be used to assess the accuracy of climate model simulations for our region.
2013 $118,785.00
2014 $115,920.00
2015 $117,100.00 Total $351,805.00
Thanks to Roberto Soria for heads up and help.
I repeat: The man ultimately responsible for the use or misuse of taxpayer dollars through the Australian Research Council is The Hon Chris Evans. Will the Coalition produce a science policy that aims for rigorous science, and prevents any dubious use of highly contested research funds? Is it possible to FOI the reasons these projects were selected over so many others? Someone, somewhere is responsible.
Good news for climate bloggers (why aren’t I “excited”?)
The topic no one was going to mention in the election campaign, just got a mention. And in less than 24 hours, it’s already being revived from oblivion. Banking group HSBC tells us that:
Barack Obama may consider introducing a tax on carbon emissions to help cut the U.S. budget deficit after winning a second term as president, according to HSBC Holdings Plc.
A tax starting at $20 a metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent and rising at about 6 percent a year could raise $154 billion by 2021, Nick Robins, an analyst at the bank in London, said today in an e-mailed research note, citing Congressional Research Service estimates. “Applied to the Congressional Budget Office’s 2012 baseline, this would halve the fiscal deficit by 2022,” Robins said.
There is no guaranteed path of course, the Republicans control the House. But how telling that the Zombie Ghost of Cap N Trade popped up its head so fast once the votes were in.
‘Congratulations to President Obama. Now that Obama will never have to face voters again, he may attempt to make global warming a key part of his legacy. Watch for the heavy hand of the EPA, which is poised to implement the climate regulations that Congress refused to pass. Obama’s vision of an EPA bureaucracy shutting down carbon based energy in the name of controlling the climate, will be massively opposed and exposed’
With a pledge to cut oil imports by half by 2020, Obama advocated during the campaign for what he called an “all of the above” approach to developing a range of domestic energy sources. He said, however, that he would roll back subsidies for oil companies and reduce the nation’s reliance on oil by mandating production of more fuel-efficient vehicles.
Those gathered on 26 March 2009 to hear from key members of Obama’s green dream team — Carol Browner, then energy and climate adviser, Nancy Sutley, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, and Van Jones, then green jobs adviser, believed it would be a pivotal year. The White House and both houses of Congress were controlled by Democrats, world leaders were due to gather in Copenhagen in December to finalise a global climate change treaty. But the economy was in meltdown. The White House, after studying polling and focus groups, concluded it was best to frame climate change as an economic opportunity, a chance for job creation and economic growth, rather than an urgent environmental problem. “My most vivid memory of that meeting is this idea that you can’t talk about climate change,” said Jessy Tolkan…
Campaign groups agree Obama continued to push the climate agenda, even if he did so below the radar, through the Environmental Protection Agency regulations and other branches of the government.
The economic recovery plan included some $90bn for green-ish measures, such as high speed rail and public transport, and weather-proofing low-income homes.
“There was a really big emphasis on talking about what I call the sub-narratives – that there were other ways to speak about the opportunity and the challenge of climate change rather than calling it that,” said Maggie Fox, the chief executive of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project. “There was a whole suite of sub-narratives: national security, clean energy future, diversification of energy, health, future generations … “
Voting is now underway in all states of the US including Hawaii and Alaska.
Something very strange is going on with money. Normally bets are a decent indicator, but in the US right now as people roll out to vote, polls are largely at 50:50, but betting odds of 2-9.
The bet-takers own website explains that Obama’s odds of victory fell to a low of 2-9, with 75 percent of the action coming in for the incumbent Obama. CSM explains that given the odds, bettors were only taking in 20 cents for every euro wagered, plus the original stake, meaning Paddy Power wasn’t paying out a longshot. On the flip side, unpaid Romney bets held odds of 7-2.
Putting a fine point on it: Gallup and Rassmussen are saying Romney 49: Obama 48. (For more poll results than you could want see the BBC. They can’t all be right.)
What really matters in the land of non-compulsory voting, is who will turn up.
In 2008 Democrats had a feverish enthusiasm for hope and change, and we know how well that worked out. American citizens were so impressed they launched a whole new party to take the Obama-plan and do the opposite.
With so much enthusiasm on the not-Obama side of the debate, those betting numbers don’t add up, indeed the mismatch is so large, it appears to be a rare chance of arbitrage. Could it be the strange end-point of media group-think and confirmation-bias?
Post by: Lance Pidgeon with assistance from Chris Gillham and others.
It is as if history is being erased. For all that we hear about recent record-breaking climate extremes, records that are equally extreme, and sometimes even more so, are ignored.
In January 1896 a savage blast “like a furnace” stretched across Australia from east to west and lasted for weeks. The death toll reached 437 people in the eastern states. Newspaper reports showed that in Bourke the heat approached 120°F (48.9°C) on three days (1)(2)(3). The maximumun at or above 102 degrees F (38.9°C) for 24 days straight.
By Tuesday Jan 14, people were reported falling dead in the streets. Unable to sleep, people in Brewarrina walked the streets at night for hours, the thermometer recording 109F at midnight. Overnight, the temperature did not fall below 103°F. On Jan 18 in Wilcannia, five deaths were recorded in one day, the hospitals were overcrowded and reports said that “more deaths are hourly expected”. By January 24, in Bourke, many businesses had shut down (almost everything bar the hotels). Panic stricken Australians were fleeing to the hills in climate refugee trains. As reported at the time, the government felt the situation was so serious that to save lives and ease the suffering of its citizens they added cheaper train services:
“The Commissioner of Railways promised a deputation of members of Parliament to run a special train every Friday at holiday excursion rates for the next month to enable settlers resident in the Western part of the colony to reach the mountains to escape the great heat prevailing.” (Source)
It got hotter and hotter and the crowded trains ran on more days of the week. The area of exodus was extended to allow not only refugees from western NSW to flee to the Blue Mountains but also people to escape via train from the Riverina to the Snowy Mountains. The stories are heartbreaking. “A child sent to the mountains to escape the city heat died at the moment the train arrived.” “Six infants have died at Goulburn since January 1 through the excessive heat.” Towns were losing their esteemed, lamenting the loss of the good reverend, or of their well known miners. Children were orphaned.
“A woman has been brought to the Bulli Hospital in a demented condition, suffering from sunstroke. She was tramping the roads, with her husband, two days before, when she was prostrated by a sunstroke. Her husband carried her through all the sweltering heat to Bulli, taking two days over the journey.” (Source).
In 1896 the heat was causing people to faint, become demented and was even blamed for driving people mad. “Several women fainted in the streets. A little girl, while walking along Surrey Hills, suddenly became demented through the heat.” In Bendigo “a young man named Edward Swift, hairdresser, was so overcome by the heat that he was unable to work, and in despair shot himself, in the breast. It is a hopeless case.” Longreach“police authorities at Longreach received information that a man who was insane was about fourteen miles out of the town.” “The bodies of people who die of sunstroke decompose very quickly”. An axe wielding man in Bourke cut down three telegraph poles before he was “secured” by police. Presumably the real cause of the madness was something else, but the heat was the last straw. “Birregurra was stirred from its wanted sleepiness on Saturday evening last by the appearance in the streets of a mad man who caused no small consternation.” It could be that nuttiness was equally common on other months, or other years. But at the time, people blamed the heat.
Thermometers were non-standardized in 1896. Some of the extraordinary temperatures come from thermometers with descriptions like (“under passion tree vine.”) There it got to 123 in Ultimo in Sydney on January 14. Though some thought the vine thermometer was actually more accurate ” namely, that what is known as the true shade is the shade afforded at the Observatory by one of the loveliest little summer-houses, almost buried in foliage, but with lattice-work all round, so that the breeze may play upon the thermometers, but where the sun’s rays can by no means be admitted.”.
Was the 2009 heatwave really worse than 1896?
The Victorian heatwave of 2009 was sold as the worst heat wave in southern Australia for 150 years. But it does not appear to be as widespread, as long, or as hot. (Though caveats of comparing different thermometer placements apply — the old ones were in odd places, but the new ones are not necessarily well placed either, with some near airports, buildings and walls). What the newspaper records of 1896 show is that modern extreme heatwaves may not be at all unprecedented in temperature, severity and certainly not worse in terms of suffering.
“These events are unprecedented,” Victoria’s energy and resources minister Peter Batchelor said on Saturday. “In some respects, they are not unlike a natural disaster, impacting on a community like a flood or tornado.” (2009)
The Victorian heatwave began on Jan 25 2009 and broke on Jan 30. Deaths in Victoria were estimated at between 200 – 374. The population of Victoria in 2009 was about 5 million, about four times larger than the population of NSW at the turn of the century. Death-rates are not a good indicator to compare the severity of heatwaves, as deaths in 1896 would have been less if air conditioners and modern hospitals had been available then.
If Alan Jones needs to get “educated” because he got the level of CO2 wrong once, the Climate Commission surely needs to go back to do high school maths, because anyone who has done junior high can see that the running average in the graph below is an impossibility. The latest Climate Commission report: “The Critical Decade: Queensland climate impact and opportunities” starts with blatantly incorrect figure. Since when do “averages” run outside the extreme highs and lows? Thanks to reader Ian E.
Eyeballing this graph suggests Queensland’s average temperature has risen by 2.7 C since the 1950’s.
The text on the same page says: “The average temperature for Queensland has risen by about 1°C since early last century”. So at least the writing matches the official (if exaggerated) records.
Who proof-read this document?
Three professors (Will Steffen, Lesley Hughes, Veena Sahajwalla) and Mr Gerry Hueston, all Climate Commissioners, signed off on it.
The correct graph should look more like this.
(Graphed by Ian E)
Even the 1 degree trend in this graph above is likely to be exaggerated
Stephan Lewandowsky is back, reminding us why argument-by-distant-unrelated-topic is a quick way to get confused.
Should we spend money trying to change the weather? Spin the wheel: Did smoking cause cancer? “Yes!” Was that money well spent? “Yes!” Is climate sensitivity 3.3C! “Yes” . The heck, it must be, because some different scientists were right about a different topic, in a different subject, in a another era. Look at how similar the problems are? No one was sure if any particular lung cancer was due to smoking, just “like” no one will ever know if Sandy was caused by your SUV. Climate starts with “C” and so does Cancer. Spooky eh?
The answer to planetary dynamics comes from tactical analysis of PR strategies by people who oppose The Consensus. Why do we even bother with satellite measurements, cloud microphysics or ARGO buoys?
No atmospheric evidence will convince Lewandowsky, he’s looking for code words in the commentariat.
The tobacco industry claims that smoking does not cause cancer, preferring instead to think of medical science as an “oligopolistic cartel” that “manufactures alleged evidence” linking smoking to cancer.
Climate deniers likewise accuse climate science of being “riddled with corruption” and of manipulating or misrepresenting “real-world scientific observations.”
Both claims smell of desperation and appear laughable to anyone who has only the slightest acquaintance with how scientific research is conducted.
“Slightest acquaintance” with research? Stephen, research starts with numbers, and the only numbers you have are polls. We have real numbers.
Can someone pop over tothe ABC and ask for our money back? An editor somewhere thought this was worth publishing?
UPDATE: This Friday Funny-type-curiosity turns out to be a 2007 story a reader emailed, and neither he nor I realized the story itself had been “bobbing around the internet” for the last five years. I wonder how many ducks are still out there?Thanks to MikeUK for pointing that out. – Jo
—————————-
Thousands of rubber ducks have been touring the worlds oceans for 15 20 years, and they are about to bob (probably already bobbed) up in England. They fell off a boat in the Pacific Ocean in January 1992, and while most washed up in the South Pacific, some lucky ducks got in the Subpolar Gyre (near Alaska) then frozen in Arctic ice. The pack-ice ducks moved at a mile a day and found their own North West Passage across to the Atlantic. By 2001 were doing tours over the Titanic, washing up between Maine and Massachusetts. Now their chief fan, Curtis Ebbesmeyer predicts they’ll head for the UK.
Mr Ebbesmeyer saw immediately how valuable the little toys would be to scientific research of the great ocean currents, the engine of the planet’s entire climate.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) worked out that the ducks travel approximately 50 per cent faster than the water in the current.
While researchers find the results important for studies of oceanic currents I think it’s interesting that ducks left to fend for themselves in the Arctic and North Atlantic have probably survived longer than those that fell into the hands of small children instead.
The Daily Mail has the full story
Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey
*The company The First Years offers a $100 savings bond as a reward for the ducks, though it apparently applies to New England, Canadan and Ireland, and I can’t see any mention of Old England. Though wait… there is a £50 bounty… that looks promising for English beach combers. Look for bleached white floatables with the words “The First Years”.
For all the data we can scrape out of rocks, shells and cylinders of ice, what we really need to know, in detail on a planetary scale, is how much energy comes in and how much goes out. That can only be measured (even roughly) with satellites.
This paper rattles the whole table of key numbers, with empirical results. It puts core numbers into a new perspective, numbers like the 3.7Watts per square meter that a doubling of CO2 is supposed to add to the surface budget.
The models are hunting for imbalances and build-ups in planetary energy. But according to the observations, the longwave (infra-red) energy coming onto the earth’s surface, the infamous back radiation, is 10 – 17 W/m2 higher than in the famous Trenberth diagram from 1997. So the models are trying to explain tiny residual imbalances, but the uncertainties and unknowns are larger than the target. The argument that “only the forcing from CO2 can fill the gap in the models” is not just argument from ignorance rhetorically, but factually too.
Another major implications is that water is churning up and falling out of the sky faster than the experts thought. The Earth’s evaporative cooler is lifting more water, taking more heat, and dumping that heat in the atmosphere. At the top of the atmosphere heat is radiating off the planet to offset the radiation coming in. On the water planet, it really is all about water.
(Click to enlarge) Figure B1 | The global annual mean energy budget of Earth for the approximate period 2000–2010. All fluxes are in Wm–2. Solar fluxes are in yellow and infrared fluxes in pink. The four flux quantities in purple-shaded boxes represent the principal components of the atmospheric energy balance.
The main observational data comes from the ARGO ocean buoys, and the ERBE and later CERES satellites.
An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations
Climate change is governed by changes to the global energy balance. At the top of the atmosphere, this balance is monitored globally by satellite sensors that provide measurements of energy flowing to and from Earth. By contrast, observations at the surface are limited mostly to land areas. As a result, the global balance of energy fluxes within the atmosphere or at Earth’s surface cannot be derived directly from measured fluxes, and is therefore uncertain. This lack of precise knowledge of surface energy fluxes profoundly affects our ability to understand how Earth’s climate responds to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. In light of compilations of up-to-date surface and satellite data, the surface energy balance needs to be revised. Specifically, the longwave radiation received at the surface is estimated to be significantly larger, by between 10 and 17 Wm–2, than earlier model-based estimates. Moreover, the latest satellite observations of global precipitation indicate that more precipitation is generated than previously thought. This additional precipitation is sustained by more energy leaving the surface by evaporation — that is, in the form of latent heat flux — and thereby offsets much of the increase in longwave flux to the surface.
The effect of CO2 forcing “is lost in the noise of uncertainty”.
There’s a mindset, a world view here that’s profoundly unreal, anti-science, and of course, fully funded by the Taxpayer from start to end (how could it be any other way?).
From the researcher who holds childish assumptions and misunderstands his own results, to the site that posts it all as if it were “higher thought”, to the trained communicator of science who then parrots the mistakes and insults half the population at the same time. Cheers! Private money couldn’t fund a satire like “The Conversation”. (Well, it could if it were funny.)
The Conversation recall was funded with $6 million.
Stephan continues his war on science
Lewandowsky’s bread and butter stuff is breaking the central tenet of science — namely, that evidence is more important than opinions. His mission (though I don’t think he’s aware of it) appears to be to return us to pre-Enlightenment days when Bishops controlled the public conversation. In this post-post-modern era, some things are so post they’re posterior — some parts of science are returning to unscience. This “science” is not about your data or reasoning, and not about your results — it’s about your ability to get a grant, a title, a university badge. Only certified practitioners of government authorized climate science grants are counted. On the gravy train, your opinion about the weather is bestowed with gravitas. In the old days, you had to make good predictions to earn respect, now dollars buys the substitute “authority” (case in point — S. Lewandowsky whose name is on $1.7m of recent grants, but virtually can’t speak without breaking a law of reason).
The big discovery this week for Lewandowsky is that the public “underestimate the level of scientific agreement” on climate science.
The “dumb” punters are sending a message to him in his research. In the real world there are independent scientists and government-dependent scientists, but Lewandowsky’s World has only the government kind and the “deniers”. This name-calling cripples his thinking (ain’t that the way?) The ritual name-calling hurts the tosser. Try this theory on instead: perhaps the public are aware that “scientists” as a group can’t predict the climate yet? So Stephan asks them if there is a consensus, they say “No”, correctly. But Lewandowsky, blind to their wisdom, instead thinks that they don’t realize there is a consensus among his hallowed Bishops of Science — the government funded climate scientists. So half the public see through the propaganda. The prof marks them “wrong”.
The fools in the street are a step ahead of the prof. At least 31,500 scientists have put their names up to disagree with the IPCC, and readers here know the drill, there are 9,000 PhD’s and professors of real science (like meteorology). We can also name 2 Nobel Prizes in physics, and 4 NASA Astronauts. Of course, that doesn’t mean skeptics are right, but it means there is no consensus.
Underlying the prof’s assumptions that peer review always works, government scientists are right and independent scientists are mentally incompetent “deniers” or outright liars, is a kind of quaint delusion of his that unlike every other human endeavor, “Science” is free of corruption, and untainted by human ambition, networking or personality defect. In his mind, the peer review process could not be skewed by mass one sided funding, the granting bodies are pure and unbiased, and dedicated scientists work just as hard to prove their ideas wrong as they do to prove them right. While independent scientists are tacky shills and zealots, government scientists are a breed above. They — the chosen ones — are immune even to the relentless campaign to denigrate “unbelievers” as old nutters bound-for-nursing-homes who squander their grandchildren’s future and pander to Phillip Morris while believing SARS was deliberate, 911 was an inside job and NASA faked that moment on the moon. If the chosen ones could just find evidence to show CO2 has no effect, they would publish it with joy (even knowing that they’ll be exorcised from the tea-room). Climate-angels fear not a fall from grace, to go from being a scientist to a denier. All the same, Lewandowsky is on the border patrol with a bullies team yelling names at the scientists who left the religion. It’s a message the scientists can’t miss.
Now I’m not for a minute saying that government funded scientists are wrong because they are government funded. That would be an ad hom. Some are right and some are wrong, but it depends on their arguments and their evidence. (And this is what I mean by evidence.) What Stephan is doing, is his damnedest to stop that discussion about evidence from starting. Sure, if you pre-load a questionnaire with a statement that 97% of scientists tell you to eat cornflakes, then survey participants know which answer you want them to give. It doesn’t change a thing about that person’s belief about the power of a tax to change the weather.
Skeptics will be dead soon
This next quote tells you all you need to know about the philosophical depth of Science Communication in Australia. Skeptics are wrong because they want …evidence (the sods!) but it’s ok, they’re old and they’ll die soon. I don’t think Will Grant has thought too hard about this. (This ANU unit, by the way, is one where I once studied and worked. Sigh.)
Will J Grant from the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at the Australian National University said it was an interesting and useful study.
“We can say people are convinced by the consensus but the big caveat is sceptics and climate change sceptics in particular are never going to be convinced by this,” he said. “They will say science doesn’t work by vote, it’s about facts.”
“Realistically, though, most of those sceptics are of an older generation. We are never going to convince them but they will be disappearing from the political discourse soon.”
I’m guessing he doesn’t know a skeptic either.
If Grant accepts the deniers label, it figures the “old folks” just never got it and never will. But it’s tricky explaining the rise in skeptics since 2008, it’s like 30% of the population just suddenly got old.
Could it be a virus?
… and can I get a grant to study that?
Dear Will, the old folks are the wise ones. A long time ago some were young and gullible.
The Clean Energy Council is an industry group promoting renewables. Not surprisingly it defines “success” as being the amount of money it has diverted from other causes into the coffers of its members. Good for them. They are free to lobby. But the RET or “renewable energy target” was set up by the government. They dictated rules to generate a false market in a product that few sane investors would invest in (remember how the same government keeps talking about how we need a “free market”?).
You and I might define success in terms of more peaceful, healthier and longer lives. Or lives where we get to spend more time with our kids and less time in a rat race. Ultimately, this is $18 billion in investments that could have been used to build houses, hospitals, medical research centres and schools. A visionary government could have made it easier for markets in Australia to develop safer, more effective vaccines, or better and earlier cancer detection, or crops with better yields, and higher essential vitamins and minerals. Total NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Funding in Australia) is in the order of $800 million per year. $18 billion could have doubled our research budget for a decade. We missed the chance to lead the world in medical research, instead we might reduce world temperature by 0.00C.
Somewhere during the next decade good people will languish in hospitals who could have been treated. They might wait for an organ donation that may or may not come in time, while an expert researcher waits for funding to follow up an idea for regenerating that same tissue from stem cells. Who knows. The patients might not be in Australia. That’s the thing about medical discoveries. When you can reduce pain and suffering, there’s a market all over the world for your exports.
AUSTRALIA’S renewable energy target (RET) has driven $18.5 billion of investment in clean power and eroded wholesale energy prices since it was introduced a decade ago, a new report suggests.
In the black-is-white, up-is-down world of spin where being forced to use more expensive sources makes it cheaper to buy electricity.
The Clean Energy Council analysis released on Thursday finds wholesale prices are as much as $10 per megawatt hour lower as a result of the RET being in place since 2001.
The Clean Energy Council explains how spending more can be called a “reduction in prices”. Note the details. They “found” the RET reduced prices, but in the reasoning, the word is not “did” but “could”, the calculations come from models, and they are not sure why it would have reduced prices, but they can scratch together a few possible reasons. Of course, there is no mention I can see of total money paid by householders for electricity including taxes needed to pump the RET. It’s a 112 page report. The only tax it discusses is the tax benefits for investors in the government subsidized scheme.
(Former Labor MP and ABC presenter) Maxine McKew writes that Ms Gillard met Mr Rudd at Kirribilli House in early January 2010.
“Gillard had a blunt message for her Prime Minister,” she writes. “She told Rudd that under no circumstances would she support the case for an election based on the need for action on climate change.
She didn’t want to offer an ETS, and later declared in the campaign “there will be no Carbon Tax”, but after the election she gave us both. Her poor supporters have been left to weasel and whine post hoc that the public voted for carbon action in 2007. Apologists dissembled on whether the carbon tax is a “tax” or a “fixed priced scheme for an ETS” pretending that a lie was not a lie, that Gillard was doing what the people wanted and not breaking her word. It all comes to nothing.
Gillard cares for working families by giving them what they asked not to get and deceiving them about what a vote for Gillard means. This is “moving forward” right? Forward to where — a third-rate autocratic state?
In 2010 eighty percent of Australians voted for parties promising no carbon tax. It’s not just that Gillard felt that an ETS was unpopular with the people, she didn’t even think it was worth trying to convince the people it ought to be popular.
How could Gillard run for another election? There is no promise she could make that anyone can believe.
The Australian weather bureau has never seen anything quite like it. The El Nino that was predicted for this summer down-under seems to be gone suddenly.
The chief climate forecaster says it is the biggest turnaround in weather patterns since records began.
For climate forecasters, this summer was shaping up as deja vu, with the Bureau of Meteorology predicting another El Nino – until Wednesday, that is.
The bureau’s manager of climate prediction services, Dr Andrew Watkins, has changed the forecast.
“Come September, all of a sudden, the temperature started to cool down, the trade winds started to become a little bit enhanced, and the cloud patterns and other indicators like that headed away from El Nino,” he said.
Dr Watkins says they are not sure why there has been a cooling down. “It actually is quite a unique situation if we end up not going into an El Nino event,” he said. “It’ll sort of be the biggest turnaround that we’ve actually seen in our records going back to about 1950, so quite unprecedented.” [full story ABC]
Good news (possibly) for farmers with more normal levels of rain likely to fall. Though that which disappears on a whimsy, could reappear suddenly too I presume? In the end it shows how much we have yet to learn about the climate.
Trawling through our National Archives, Lance Pidgeon has found stories of how a heatwave in 1932 was so extreme that it caused mass bird deaths across outback Australia. The PDF is posted on Warwick Hughes blog. As Lance says, imagine the headlines if that had happened 80 years later. Presumably some would blame coal, airconditioners, and SUV’s for “killing billions of birds”. These old newspaper records also raise questions about our national temperature databases. Things appeared to be hotter then, than history now records them? I’ve only had time for a quick look and a cut and paste.
Great numbers were killed alone by the fortnightly train to Alice Springs. These fell exhausted on the railway line. A large number flew into the fans in the carriages and perished. Thousands fell exhausted in water pools and were drowned. A letter from Minnie Downs told of the death of thousands of birds on one day. The temperature that day was 125 degrees in the shade— and there was no shade. One woman at Tarcoola filled a 40-gallon drum, with shell parrots in one afternoon. Trees actually snapped under the strain of flight after flight of birds which swarmed exhausted on them. More than 60,000 dead parrots, it was estimated, were in one dam. Dams and wells for hundreds of miles were piled with dead birds. In places the dead birds were lying two feet deep over the ground. Almost every bushman is a bird lover, and they saved thousands of their feathered friends.”
Note “figures run into billions.” and “The temperature that day was 125 degrees in the shade “. The original stories from the “Mammologist” and more here.
The birds had been doing well and spread farther north than normal… I gather some bounties had even been offered to cull them, but the heat appeared to do the job far more effectively than human hunters.
“From one of his dams he said he took out and burnt about five tons of Parrots. ‘ We made a net with wirenetting,’ he said, ‘and dragged it from one side to the other and then extracted the birds, as the fisherman does his fish.” From here.
“Skeptics” are described as if they are one small block of fringe extremists, but not only is half the population skeptical in some sense, in this debate I am not on either extreme, but a centrist, smack in the middle. On the one hand, alarmists are convinced the climate is headed for a catastrophe, and on the other some people are convinced there is no greenhouse effect at all. Wes Allen, sits in the middle with me, and he’s been engaged in an intense debate with people on both ends of the spectrum. After a scorching critique of Tim Flannery’s work, he has swung his attention the other way. Here is his synopsis of the Slayers book, for discussion, and I’m sure it will generate a long passionate defence and debate, just as previous posts on this topic have. (eg: Why greenhouse gas warming doesn’t break the second law of thermodynamics and So what is the Second Darn Law?). I know the Slayers are keen to discuss their ideas. I’m hopeful people can remain polite, as that’s where progress may be made… many thanks to Wes here who has done a diligent write up, and has gone to great lengths to get the details right. The man is in a relentless pursuit of answers. Some may prefer to read the full PDF, I’ve only posted parts of the first 4 pages here. Sorry I can’t post it all up, but it is long! – Jo
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Is the Greenhouse Effect a Sky Dragon Myth?
A Dialogue with the Authors of Slaying the Sky Dragon
Dr D Weston Allen – meet the author here 30th September 2012
INTRODUCTION
My book, The Weather Makers Re-Examined, published in 2011 by Irenic Publications, was a comprehensive and damning critique of Tim Flannery’s alarming best seller which claimed ‘we are The Weather Makers’. I now examine Slaying the Sky Dragon (SSD), a full frontal attack on the greenhouse theory or ‘sky dragon’ by eight authors who refer to themselves as the ‘Slayers’ (p.358) – a term I adopt when referring to them. This 358 page book was published in 2011 by Stairway Press in WA (USA).
Defining the sky dragon
The ‘greenhouse theory’ gradually evolved from the seminal work and limited understanding[i] of Joseph Fourier in the 1820s, John Tyndall in the 1860s, Svante Arrhenius in 1896-1908, Guy Callendar in 1938 to Gilbert Plass in the 1950s. It holds that solar radiation penetrates Earth’s atmosphere to reach the surface which is warmed by the absorption of this electromagnetic energy. The warmed surface emits infrared radiation, and much of this outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) is intercepted by trace gases in the atmosphere. Some of this energy is radiated back to Earth’s surface where it is absorbed as thermal energy, thus enhancing solar warming of the surface by day and slowing cooling by night. Since glass on a greenhouse also absorbs and re-radiates infrared (IR) radiation, this atmospheric phenomenon became known as the ‘greenhouse effect’ (GHE), and the trace gases are referred to as ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG).
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