Lordy. Lordy. How did Snyder 2016 get past rigorous peer review and into a supposed “top” journal like Nature?
Carolyn Snyder did a 2 million year temperature reconstruction then assumed that all the warming in the whole record was caused by CO2, she then carried that correlation right through to reach the absurd conclusion that climate sensitivity is not 2 – 4C, but 7 to 13 freaking degrees. (Did she study climate science by watching Al Gore?)
Normally we’d expect a climate expert to know that orbital mechanics drive most of the changes.
Don’t look now, but Gavin Schmidt has done the right thing and pointed out a very silly conclusion that Nature and all their reviewers missed. (If only Nature had asked bloggers to review it …)
This obvious mistake has caught out a lot of the press. It was also missed by The ABC, The Conversation, Andrew Glikson etc etc. The Daily Mail (UK) published a version by Associated Press, and they at least asked Michael Mann who said he “remains skeptical until more research confirms it” (as if!), and Jeremy Shakun, who said it “seems too high”. Though AP buried those weak warnings and still went with the apocalyptic headline: Earth is warmer that it has been in 120,000 years – and is ‘locked in’ to hit its hottest mark in more than 2 million years, study claims. (Who forgot the Holocene? )
The paper claims that ESS is ~9ºC and that this implies that the long term committed warming from today’s CO2 levels is a further 3-7ºC. This is simply wrong.
The original study estimated a climate sensitivity of 7 – 13C:
Two million years of records show emissions could already warm world to dangerous levels
The new paper recalculates this sensitivity again — and unfortunately the results aren’t in our favour. The study suggests that stabilisation of today’s CO2 levels would still result in 3-7C warming, whereas doubling of CO2 will lead to 7-13C warming over millennia.
The research uses proxy measurements for temperature (such as oxygen isotopes and magnesium-calcium ratios from plankton) and for CO₂ levels, calculated for every 1,000 years back to 2 million years ago.
Climate change study accused of erring on rising temperature predictions
Prominent climate scientists have issued a warning that a paper published in the influential journal Nature sensationalised climate change predictions and used an “incorrect calculation”.
“The ratio that gave that, which was the very high sensitivity that she calculates, comes from a correlation between temperature and the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the ice cores, but as we all know, correlation does not equal causation.
“And in this case, the causation is the orbital wobbles of the Earth’s climate that are controlling both the temperature and the carbon dioxide at the same time and so that’s giving you an exaggerated view of how carbon dioxide affects temperature directly.”
Dear Dr Glikson — you asked to write part 6 in our debate — you’re still welcome. :- )
After the hottest ever El Nino year with relentless propaganda on Australian media, even a loaded survey finds that only 39% of Australians agree that humans are the major drivers of the climate. The survey is being painted as a success by obedient “journalists”. But this is not skyrocketing support, it’s more likely last gasp noise. The results will be down again next year (with the weather).
It is yet another meaningless motherhood survey that avoids asking real questions, offers unbalanced answers, and uses the same ambiguous language as most of these pointless surveys do. Would you like apple-pie?
Who doesn’t want nicer weather — and for free?
The questions climate fans are too scared to ask
Obviously The Climate Institute don’t want real answers, which they must know would be devastating. They won’t ask how much people want to pay out their own pocket to fix the climate. They won’t ask people to rank “climate change” against all the other issues they care about. They won’t ask people if Climate Change is a scam, a con, or a scheme to make the green industry rich (a year ago a US poll showed 31% were happy to call climate change a “total hoax“). Things don’t get more skeptical than that, but if surveyors don’t ask, they’ll never know.
These surveys never ask if the public thinks windmills will slow storms or make floods less likely. There is a good reason for that…
The ugly truth — for the public it’s not important, and they don’t want to pay
The results are the same all over the western world. Even after a heavy loaded survey lists climate disasters, half of Brits don’t want to pay a cent. When asked almost the same question, (is it mostly human driven?) 56% of Canadians are skeptics. When the Swiss were asked if they should change their VAT to a carbon tax 92% of the Swiss said “No Thanks“. It was sold to them as “paying less tax” overall and saving the world, but almost everyone in Switzerland thought it was a dumb idea. That wasn’t a poll, it was a referendum.
Gullible journalists and poorly trained science communicators
The unequivocal acceptance of loaded weak surveys says a lot about journalistic and academic standards. The Climate Institute is a group whose whole existence depends convincing people that we should be alarmed about the climate. Poor Fergus Hunter of the SMH is supposedly “a breaking news reporter for Fairfax Media in the federal press gallery at Parliament House”. But he swallows the press release entirely, asking no hard questions and doing no research. Likewise The Conversation runs with the agitprop — James Whitmore, Editor at The Conversation does no analysis and provides no balance. Pravda would be proud. In an academic wasteland, Will Grant is paid at the ANU to lecture in the public awareness of science but apparently hasn’t done so much as a 2 second google search on climate surveys, nor has he been taught how to write surveys. Shame, but that’s what government funding gets you. Parrots.
For the mainstream voters, climate issues get hidden so the electorate won’t cane them. The only passion in the electorate is for blood oaths to get rid of carbon taxes.
How loaded are these questions?
“I think that climate change is occurring” — even skeptics like me would say “yes” to this – yet 23% of Australians didn’t agree.
In a landscape of trite questions, 75% of Australians might think that governments in Australia “need to implement a plan to ensure the orderly closure of old coal plants and replace them with clean energy.” But what’s the alternative, that governments shouldn’t plan? Making plans with someone else’s money is a tooth fairy kind of commitment. It’s amazing that a quarter of Australians don’t even think the Government should implement a plan.
And glory be, only 3% of people say “coal is their preferred energy source” but for virtually every Australian 73% of their electricity is created with coal. They are all free to go off-grid and be totally renewable. Almost no one does it. Why not ask Australian’s if they’d like to pay 10c a KWhr for electricity from coal (which wholesales at 3 or 4 c).
God forbid, 90% would suddenly have a different preference.
This week XKCD (a popular Geek comic site) posted an epic cartoon called “A Timeline Of Earth’s Average Temperature”. It was a cutesy long godzilla hockey-stick — “scary” to the unwary.
It’s easy to make a scary historical-looking temperature graph — so easy that the artist probably didn’t even know how. (Thank Shakun, Marcott, Annan, Hadcrut and the IPCC for doing the tricky part.) First, guesstimate temperatures over last 20,000 years with anything at hand: tree-rings, ice bubbles, coral, fossilized tea leaves, whatever. Blend. Then stop the proxies, tack on thermometer data that was recorded in a different way with different errors and a very different response to faster temperature changes. Finally, launch that line into the future with unvalidated, skillless multivariate models that predict a fingerprint which 28 million weather balloons can’t find. Then take the models that didn’t work for the last twenty years, and run with the errors to the next century… Voila!
I took the 14,000 pixel cartoon and squeezed it to one shot that shows the curve that matters. See the error bars? Me neither.
(But who needs an uncertainty range when you have faith?)
Click to enlarge.
The secret to a good hockey-stick graph is to never use the same type of data from start to end. If things like tree rings and ice bubbles were so good at measuring the temperature circa 5,015 BC, why don’t we use them in 2015?
Could it be that thermometers will measure every hot day, but corals don’t?
Adding together lots of errors and uncertainties will make a nice smooth line. Any noise can be averaged to one note. This gives the illusion that the climate was once stable.
The Medieval Warm Period was recorded in hundreds of studies. Temperatures a thousand years ago were not so different to today. In the XKCD graph, that bump’s gone, blended to nothing. xkcd calls it “regional” but 6,000 boreholes drilled all over the world suggest otherwise, so do warm Indonesian waters, receding glaciers in New Zealand and melting ice in Antarctica. (See NIPCC.) How many other bumps in the last 20,000 years disappeared like this too? About 20,000 years worth. It’s like a thousand year smoother was run over the graph up until the last 100 years.
The picture xkcd presents is lacking any indication of uncertainty, which is the major flaw. We should not be looking at lines, which imply perfect certainty, but blurry swaths that indicate uncertainty. Too many people are too certain of too many things, meaning the debate is far from “settled.”
Global temperatures vary less than polar ones. So I took data from Vostok and Greenland and shrunk to half its actual variation and slapped it over the xkcd line. See it below. This is just an indication of the variability missing from the “smoothed” proxies. The invisible error bars on the original XKCD graph would be wide.
Click to enlarge.
Apparently the data for the XKCD graph comes from Marcott (ha ha, UPDATE See Climate Audit: The Marcott Filibuster, and others on Marcott. My post on Marcott: “Ponder how researchers can find 5,000 year old Foraminifera deposits, but not ones from 1940?”
Another good quote so relevant to the graph: That’s 300 year smoothing. We should average the climate from 1700 to now. How scary would that look?
“Marcott et al clearly say there is “…essentially no variability preserved at periods shorter than 300 years…” So if there were, say, occurrences of a warming rise exactly like the last century, this graph won’t show them.”.
You want noise? This is noise:
Anyone who has looked at proxies, knows that they don’t make long smooth lines. This is just the last 2,000 years of variability in the Northern Hemisphere. There are a lot of not-hockey-sticks.
Click to enlarge
Things we know for sure: The Earth was warmer for thousands of years than it is now during In The Holocene peak. Corals and polar bears survived. CO2 was not to blame for the heat that didn’t kill corals or bears.
h/t To Todd, Dennis.
Psst: Matt Briggs explains why BCE is a spelling mistake:
The plot purportedly shows the average global temperature, presumably measured right above the surface, beginning in 20,000 BC and ending in the future at 2100 AD. Mr Munroe misspells “BC” as “BCE” throughout the cartoon, incidentally, and leaves out “AD”.
No, I’m kidding. “BC” means “Before Christ”, which some academics, sensitive creatures that they are, find offensive on behalf of people they haven’t met, and so they change it to “Before the Common Era”. And how do they demarcate the “Common Era”? By the birth of Christ, a.k.a. BC. The same people who gave us “BCE” gave us “safe spaces”. Skip it. — W. M Briggs.
Update: :- )
It’s no wonder that skeptics deride,
What hockey-stick warmists decide,
When some smooth operator,
Can make warming come later,
To be man-made, extreme and worldwide.
We are ramping up the end of this series because we’ve been informed that both of David’s papers will be published in October — one on the error in the climate models and one on the notch delay solar theory.
There are emphatic (and ignorant) claims that David’s predictions have failed, and a flaw was found — both are wrong. After all that fuss and pointless flamewars, his prediction remains almost exactly the same as it was in 2014. It is still untested. It is a strange coincidence of timing that the theory is up for a critical trial so definitively, so soon, but there it is. The fall in solar radiation that happened in 2004 is one of the three largest in 400 years. We are waiting to see if that will have an effect, after the expected delay of one sunspot cycle. For a real scientist there is no shame in putting an idea up on the chopping block. Hypothesize, test, and observe. As David says: “If the predicted cooling does not eventuate then the notch-delay hypothesis is false.” Without real predictions, it’s not real science.
But prediction is a risky business. There are so many ways things can go wrong, and we’ve had pleas from wise souls warning David not to put out an exact number and date. But he has always gone with the numbers, unemotionally shifting gears as the data swung. (I’ve seen him once coolly drop 18 months of work entirely when new information came in.) From the start, he has said that if the cooling doesn’t happen by 2022 then something is very wrong with the hypothesis. If the delay between solar TSI (as measured by PMOD) is really a half solar cycle, then some cooling effect should be visible soon — it will most likely start in 2017, but it may take ’til 2022 (it’s a technical thing — depending on whether the step function was “causal” as opposed to “non-causal”, see below). Of course, El Ninos or other natural variations may cloud the signal. If a volcano erupts, or a La Nina kicks in, it will take longer to filter the noise.
For the sake of the public “debate” notice that the fall in solar radiation (TSI) is a fall in smoothed data — averaged over 11 years. We expect Leif Svalgaard to continue to deny there was a fall. He’s talking about his data, and ignoring the smoothing. David discusses the different datasets below.
David’s overarching prediction is that the 2020s will be no warmer than the 1980s, which should kill off the carbon dioxide theory of global warming.
In the end, we’re only talking of ~0.3 °C of cooling, which is significant on a global scale, but not something you’ll notice in the garden at home.
I am perhaps even more jaded than David — with homogenization and adjustment of data, I am not convinced that 0.3°C changes will show up amongst the man-made noise in some datasets. The past keeps shifting. But that, as we all know, is another story. — Jo
This post predicts an upcoming global cooling, based on the large fall in underlying total solar irradiation (TSI) in 2004 and either of the notch-delay hypotheses (Force X, or Force ND). If the hypothesis is right, sustained and significant cooling of about 0.3 °C will begin in around 2017, one sunspot cycle after the 11-year smoothed fall around 2004 (=2004+13), or for various technical reasons, possibly up to five years after that.
Some caveats: there is no satisfactory instrument for measuring TSI even today; much TSI “data” and all TSI before 1979 is based on reconstruction via questionable models; it is not known which solar parameter is best for predicting force X/D in ~11 years and it might not be TSI; the observations of a delay in post 22 are based on a variety of TSI measures; and of course Yogi Berra’s oldie-but-goodie “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
The Recent Fall in TSI
A composite TSI was constructed by combining all of the sources of TSI mentioned in post 21, so it relies mainly on PMOD and Lean’s reconstruction with the background correction of Wang, Lean, and Sheeley. It is shown in Fig. 1 to give historical perspective: the recent fall in TSI starting around 2004 is one of the three largest falls in TSI ever recorded, with records from 1610. It is almost the same magnitude as the fall from 1610 to 1645 that led to the Maunder Minimum and the depth of the Little Ice Age, or the fall from 1795 to 1810 that led to the Dalton Minimum.
Figure 1: Composite TSI and composite temperature since 1610. The recent fall in TSI is the one of the three largest and steepest on record.
Here is a closer view of the recent fall, with sunspots and several measures of TSI, including PMOD/Lean’s reconstruction, our composite TSI, and recent reconstructions:
Figure 2: Various measures of sunspots or TSI, all 11 year-smoothed (averaged over a centered 11-year window, to eliminate the effect of an 11-year cycle). The TIM is the latest instrument for measuring TSI, but only started in Jan. 2003, too late to cast smoothed light on 2004. The SORCE/TIM reconstruction by Kirvova is preferred by the IPCC in AR5, and the reconstruction from Leif Svalgaard in mid 2014 is similar.
The government announced last year that it would extend grants for electric cars for a further two years but halved the payments to £2,500. Around 17,500 cars were registered in the first three months of the year as motorists took advantage of the grants before they were cut.
… According to Department for Transport statistics, between April and June 4,200 plug-in cars were sold – the lowest for two years.
2014 saw a surge in UK green car sales due to increased choice and a demand for lower costs and higher efficiency, reports Edie.net
When the sales disappear, so do mentions of buyers who want “higher efficiency”. Parliament gets the blame, though it never seemed to get the credit.
Spot the economic genius in 2015:
[Nick] Clegg said: “The extremely low running costs of these cars help drivers save money. Electric cars are one of the most promising of our green industries…”
Sounds pretty dire for the rest of the Green world then.
Giant climate funds issue giant press releases but not much else.The pledges aren’t being kept, hardly any money is being handed out. The posterchild drowning Islands are being left dangling in danger because the forms are too complicated.
Everyone wants to save the world, but not enough to make the forms simpler:
Red tape’ locking small island states out of billions in climate funds
Many small developing countries are so administratively stretched that they cannot fill in all the complex forms needed to access climate money to help them to reduce emissions and adapt to increasing global temperatures, rising sea levels and extreme weather.
Small Pacific Islands will drown in red tape before they drown in a rising ocean:
Although billions of dollars of climate money is theoretically available, in practice red tape and paperwork makes it is extremely hard and slow to get hold of, says the Commonwealth Secretariat, the central institution of the 53 Commonwealth countries, who are among the hardest hit by climate change.
UN priorities? What’s more important — collecting funds to save the Islands, or saving the actual islands…
Fiji’s high commissioner in London, Jitoko Tikolevu, said the process of applying for climate funds was “very cumbersome”. “We need to be trained how to access the money. It’s one thing having it available, it’s another getting access to it.
The solution? Don’t simplify forms, employ more bureaucrats:
Low institutional capacity, convoluted forms, and a complex and slow approval process all but denies small countries, says the secretariat, which is to pay for experts to work with small Commonwealth countries to help them access money.
Big Climate Fund Puffery
All talk, no action. The Green Climate Fund has spent only 4% of what was promised:
It has an “aspirational goal” to commit $2.5bn this year, which many observers say it is unlikely to meet.
Don’t mix the Green Climate Fund up with the nameless pot of $100 billion which is candidly referred to only as “One Hundred Billion Dollars”. It’s not a Fund to Save Earth,so much as a Fund to get Funds. I’ll call it the OHBD fund. This is a fund that began in Copenhagen in 2009.
Rich countries together pledged to mobilise $100bn (£77bn) a year by 2020 in last year’s Paris climate talks. But, according to new analysis by the Commonwealth Secretariat, since 2009 only $726m has been received by the smallest 31 small Commonwealth states, including Dominica, Guyana, Namibia, Nauru, Solomon Islands, St Kitts and Nevis, Tonga and Vanuatu.
Perhaps with a bit more research The Guardian might find a newer link, but the “OHBD” Fund page is a year old, and most of the links are forbidden. I went looking to see how much of the $100b a year they were getting and spending. The joint statement mentions the “$100 billion dollar goal” many times, but doesn’t mention any specific numbers or achievements except for the word-salad that “initial resource mobilization to exceed $10 billion” in 2014. (What ever that means). So six years after they started they’ve reached 10% (maybe) of their target. Four busy years to go then?
It’s no accident I can’t find a number, the “Key Elements of Our Common Methodology” is that they can’t account:
“It is important to note that current data and methodological limitations prevent us from accounting for the full range of flows that we are mobilizing towards the $100 billion goal at this time, in particular those mobilized through public policy interventions. As such, any near-term estimate produced will necessarily be partial, and will omit some – and possibly a substantial amount – of climate finance mobilized. We intend to continue to improve our methodology as data availability increases and measurement methods evolve, and, as a result, we expect our reporting to become more complete over time.”
More proof it seems that the big climate funds are mostly there to grab headlines.
Meanwhile red tape is warming the world, and increasing deadly emissions. Where are the Environmentalists Against Redtape? Off partying with the Grassroots Form Fillers who could save whole Islands at the stroke of a pen, but are too busy asking for more money to put in nameless UN pots.
Remember the government funded play “Kill The Deniers”? They’re back!
This time they’ve got a talkie-dance video (is it funded by the ACT government again? I don’t know). They’re launching it today in Canberra (Weds 21st). See it below — at first glance I thought David Finnigan was up to his deep game — living satire — where he pretends to mock skeptics while he’s really satirizing the Global Worriers, post modern art, and pointless government funding. It could be, but this one looks more like a therapy session. Let’s work through the pain, and pretend the artistes paid for childish drama are the victims of meanie words…
But cynically, seriously, maybe climate skeptics were the only ones who paid any attention last time, and this is just a gambit for a link from Andrew Bolt?
Note the credits:
Words by Andrew Bolt, Joanne Nova, and Bishop Hill and all the commenters
The narrative is about someone with a bag on their head who gets uncovered, does a big stretch, dances around some cardboard heads, then she stops and they put the bag back on. Plotless. (You expected a plot, you philistine?)
Andrew Bolt is the obvious target. Anyone know why Mel Gibson’s head is in this? What did he do?
I was excited to be credited with words (my first single!), but I fear they missed my best lines. Actually, I think they missed all my lines. I don’t think they could use any of what I wrote. I think they wished I had said “… if a war starts, a lot of eco-activists will be killed first” — that sounds so much more exciting than being described as a group accidentally parodying themselves. Those female voices might sound like they speak the words of the only female named at the end, but it is not so.
Remember the play? “Briefly, the scenario is this: a classic rock band take the stage in Parliament House’s main hall, 96 armed eco-terrorists storm the building and take the entire government hostage, threatening to execute everyone unless Australia ends global warming.” — Citynews, Canberra
Only government art would call this a “classic rock band”:
“Kill the Deniers” — All the wit and wisdom of government funded “arts”. Can’t persuade the voters? Shoot their representatives.
Look out HG Wells:
“THIS COULD BE Canberra’s answer to HG Wells’ “The War Of The Worlds,” but you’ll have to be at Smiths Alternative this Wednesday night to find out exactly what the “Kill Climate Deniers” project is all about when its new album is launched.”
David Finnigan, seems to be doing a brave new kind of living satire –– one where he lives the genre full time as he prepares, never breaking out of character in tweets, blogs, or plays. Sheer brilliance! He is self-satirizing the paranoid useful idiot who swallows improbable scientific visions about controlling the weather, and uses hyperbolic crass motherf…… language in a form of scientific self-mockery. Taking things to absurd extremes, he calls himself peaceful while he admires terrorists, invents conspiracy theories, and dreams of bloody revolution.
Truly, this could be a remarkable production that we will laugh at for years to come. In a stroke of innovation, the production is not the play that is in draft — instead it’s the media, the blogs, and his own parody responses. The show is on!
Good satirists understand their targets. Here is Finnigan-the-writer, pretending to be an artist but secretly playing the role of a paranoid fearmonger, thinking skeptics may be trying to kill him.
We are not advocating for the murder of carbon lobbyists! Frankly at this late stage in the game it looks like you guys are trying to kill us, where us = anyone not wealthy enough to survive …
Presumably David-Finnigan-the-self-satirist will toy with Fairfax journalists and green politicians soon and say he was only talking of water-pistols, or metaphors of cleansing, I mean cleaning. Then we can all laugh at them. Of course, he doesn’t mean real hostages either. Which he explains by admiring other satirical actors called “Chechens” who did this amazing play in a theater in Russia:
In 2002, about 50 armed Chechens broke into the Dubrovka Theatre in Russia and took the 850 occupants hostage, demanding an end to the Russian occupation of Chechnya. Their efforts were unsuccessful, ending when the Russian government gassed the building with a toxic substance, killing 200 of their own citizens as well as the terrorists. Nevertheless, their attempt provides a model for what a real challenge to the status quo might look like.
…perhaps emotional artistes are being played by big-money? Let’s explore that idea. What if Big Money was using the fools-for-tools tactic — the smart players are making cashola from carbon trading and renewables, respectively $176b and $300b industries. The Green vested interests are now a $1.5 trillion industrial complex. The clever self-serving players can push predictable fear-buttons in people who are not-good-with-numbers, who respond by feeling real angst, frustration and dismay.
Then the poor panicking pawns convert their angst into shallow fantasies of control through brute force.
When will the government fund this expose?
You can buy the album, and buy the script
The official blurb:
Kill Climate Deniers is an album of original music by Reuben Ingall in the style of classic House and Techno from 1988-92 – mixed with samples from David Finnigan’s stage-play of the same name.
The lyrics for ‘Bolted’ are by Andrew Bolt writing about Kill Climate Deniers, and from his commenters and fellow bloggers: ‘The Left is the natural home of the modern totalitarian – and of all those who feel entitled by their superior morality to act as savages.’
This is the devastating question few surveyors are willing to ask. Survey teams usually use mindless motherhood questions instead, like whether we “believe” in climate change. (Who doesn’t?) Or they ask if we want clean energy… (doh, like I want my energy dirty?) But the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research actually did a nationally representative poll of 1097 adults.
Everyone wants a nice climate, but hardly anyone wants to pay for it:
When asked whether they would support a monthly fee on their electric bill to combat climate change, 42 percent of respondents are unwilling to pay even $1. Twenty-nine percent would pay $20, an amount roughly equivalent to what the federal government estimates the damages from climate change would be on each household. And, 20 percent indicate they are willing to pay $50 per month. Party affiliation is the main determinant of how much people are willing to pay, not education, income, or geographic location. Democrats are consistently willing to pay more than Republicans.
This is despite the fact that a whopping 77% said they think climate change is happening and 65% think it is a problem the government should do something about.
This is an upside-down result. The best available science tells us that Americans should be willing to pay considerably more, because the damages from climate change are so great…
He thinks that people don’t see this as a threat to themselves personally. But the answer is mostly within the survey, at Q20 which basically asks if people are confident that greenhouse gas obligations will be met. Fully 31% of people don’t think the US will reduce emissions, and two thirds don’t think India or China will. So who wants to pay for something that is likely to fail?
They didn’t go on to ask how many people thought that windmills or carbon markets would cool the planet. The answer to that would scare the pants of the lobbyists, and blow the whole charade. The real story is that everyone wants a nicer climate, but most people know it’s a waste of money. That’s why this is a dead topic in the election.
This is big. The French press today is full of stories on the former President Nicolas Sarkozy “coming out as a skeptic”. He’s running again for President, and can see the ocean of votes in speaking out against political correctness. Sarcozy will have watched the rise of Marine Le Pen and of Donald Trump. The game has changed.
Pandering to the Global Bullies no longer works. Once the fear of being called a “climate denier” is gone, there is nothing to stop half of the political divide from a phase change. (Well, nothing at least apart from lobbying, donations and gifts from the $1.5 Trillion dollar Green Machine). The Brexit shock spreads. Democracy is not dead yet. — Hat tips to Phillip and to Benoît. ROM.
French voters will get a real choice:
Sarkozy comes out of the closet as a climate skeptic
Presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy reckons that climate change is not caused by man and that the world has far bigger problems on its hands than global warming.
Nicolas Sarkozy, who is fighting to regain the presidency that he lost to François Hollande in 2012, has finally come out of the closet as a climate skeptic.
Speaking in front of business leaders Sarkozy, a candidate for Les Republicains party primary in November, told them that man alone was not to blame for climate change.
“Climate has been changing for four billion years,” the former president said according to AFP. “Sahara has become a desert, it isn’t because of industry. You need to be as arrogant as men are to believe we changed the climate.”
The former French president who hopes to win the right-wing nomination for another shot at the top job has already shown himself adept at Trump’s populist game, playing communities off against one another in his own interest. Yesterday, Sarko was speaking to French business leaders and he said that it was simply arrogant to claim that the human race was responsible for climate change. “The climate has been changing for four billion years,” said the Republican leader, “but it wasn’t industry that turned the Sahara into a desert.”
Sarkozy told his audience that, in fact, population growth is a far more serious threat to the planet than pollution. “There’ll be 11 billion of us in a few years. Man is directly responsible. But nobody takes any interest,” he went on to say.
Back in 2007, Sarkozy assured a different audience that “we have to have the courage to define our policies while recognising that we cannot ignore the climate challenge, unless we want to destroy the very conditions upon which human survival depends.”
The Global Cooling Scare of the 1970s was real, there was a consensus, and it was all over the media. It flies in the face of the man-made warming campaign. After World War II there was a massive industrial escalation in the West. And just as coal fired power was going in everywhere, the world damnwell cooled by -0.3°C. It’s obvious that the modern Climate Witches don’t want people bringing this up.
…
Where’s that cooling gone? The modern NASA GISS dataset adjusted it away:
What happened to 40 years of cooling from WWII onewards?
That’s the magic of homogenisation.
In 2008, Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck published “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” . The Myth paper “found” that from 1965 through 1979, there were only 7 cooling, 20 neutral, and 44 warming papers. It was published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), showing how pathetically weak the caliber of review is there. Kenneth Richard searched, found and documents 220 papers, not 7 in the same period. He estimates there are probably many more.
The Connolley there is none other than the William Connolly who abused Wikipedia’s editing rules — barred 2,000 other Wiki editors that he disagreed with, and changed over 5,000 articles to conform with his personal warming religion and his Greens political activism. Apparently he’s used the same flagrant bias in the peer review literature. Wiki took away his Admin status, which appears to be a higher standard than AMS. So much for “peer review”.
“in the early 1970s the prevailing view was that the earth was moving toward a new ice age. Many articles appeared in the scientific literature as well as in the popular press speculating about the impact on agriculture of a 1-2°C cooling. ”
William M. Briggs would be the smartest, funniest and best informed Climate Editor the New York Times ever had. He’d put the Times back on the map as the frontline of debate. As such, there is no way he will get this job (and this is a real application). He’s the perfect candidate — the Statistician to the Stars has published actual papers on climate models, uncertainty, and yet also writes with wit and humor.
Guys like William are the reason the new media is killing the old.
It is the Times’s tremendous luck that I’m at liberty, ready, and willing to take on this monumental task. Together we can screw people’s heads back on straight and get them to worry about something really important. Like the rise of politics dictating science and the corrupting influence of money.
I am an actual bona fide scientist. I have published actual articles in the Journal of Climate, among many others. My specialty is in the value and goodness of models, and the expense and badness of bad science. I’ve written a best-seller (my mom bought two copies) on the subject. Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability & Statistics. I know this is a presumptuous questions, but if I get the job can I get this reviewed in the Book Review? Might boost sales.
How can they knock this back?
We’d run this headline: “Wonderful News: Global-Warming-Of-Doom Proved Almost Surely False”.
I envision a series in which we expose the schemers, hangers-on, band-waggoners, activists, fund-raisers, self-deluded, egos (I almost said “politicians”, which would have been redundant), and even frauds and bamboozlers whose claimed knowledge of fluid physics on a rotating sphere is as artificial as that thing perched on Donald Trump’s cranium. Let’s call out these folks who have turned “climate change” into an unhealthy living.
How many times have we heard psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, economists, and other un-trained scientifically ignorant (I use this word in its technical sense) academics lecture us on the horrors that await us under “climate change” when they wouldn’t know a cloud parameterization from a sigma coordinate? I’ll tell you: too often.
I predict the Editors of the Times will continue to cower behind petty namecalling, will fear doing anything socially risky, and will miss this opportunity to beat the rise of the new media.
In his maiden speech as a new Senator, Malcolm Roberts looks sharp, stands tall, and fires his words precisely, and articulately. He oozes determination.
He’s put in long hours for years to be there and he knows exactly why he’s there. James Jeffrey in The Australian described it as “impassioned”, delivered with “the pyrotechnic power of his larynx”:
Roberts gave a speech that left even his leader, Pauline Hanson, with big shoes to fill. He quoted John Cleese, former US president Andrew Jackson and Banjo Paterson, and compared himself to Socrates. Climate change was boomingly dismissed as “a scam”.
His remarks on climate science are in the first ten minutes: Roberts strength is his reasoning — his focus on cause and effect. He’s right to draw attention to the failed predictions of Flannery and Karoly; he’s right to talk about the pause, and the cooling from WWII to the late 70s.
He’s right to keep asking for the data that shows that human use of hydrocarbon fuels affects the climate. Its 2,447 days since I asked if there was any evidence. To save the planet, you’d think one person would have emailed it.
Malcolm has been in the trenches of the carbon wars. At the start he thanks many familiar names, like the late great Bob Carter, and Ian Plimer. And it’s nice to see recognition to a lot of fellow volunteers — some of whom are dedicated at achieving things behind the scenes, yet rarely get a public thank you.
“The biggest purchase of our life is not our home, it’s government.
“We work Monday to mid-morning Thursday for the government.”
Australia’s values and way of life are also at risk from insidious institutions such as the unelected swill that is the United Nations.
The people of the United Kingdom recently spoke and I have great admiration for the way they broke free of that socialist monolithic monster, the European Union. The EU is a template for total socialist domination of Europe through unelected bodies such as the IMF forcing their frightening agenda on the people. It is also the UN’s template and Australia must leave the UN, we need an Aus-exit.
We once thought we were a poor nation, when we were actually rich. Sadly, we now think we’re a rich nation, yet we are becoming poor. Instead of no nation, we must have one nation.
The Greens Senators rudely refused to get up and congratulate the new Senator as is the custom. Some called that a snub, but for Malcolm their petty bad-manners would be a reward — a badge of honor. As he says on Twitter: “If I upset the Greens, then I hit the target”.
Malcolm Roberts will give his maiden Senate speech tomorrow (Tuesday) at 5pm at the Australian Parliament House in Canberra. To reserve seating contact Leon Ashby leon.ashby AT aph.gov.au or phone (02) 6277 3151. He has asked for updated graphs of the UAH data for Australia. His speech may be available via the APH website. (h/t Jim S)
Luckily for us the UAH satellite database can be filtered to track temperatures in the lower troposphere over the Australian land mass. Thanks to John Christy for providing an Australian specific dataset.
Here is the full Australian monthly data from 1979 – now for all seasons graphed below. There are breathless news articles hyping every hot month, every hot week, for records in every little region, and even for a single record hot nights, but no press release to say that temperatures in Australia have not really changed in a meaningful way since 1995.
The Australian UAH data covers land but not ocean, Tasmania, but not PNG or Indonesia. It’s really quite useful recording that operates continuously day and night, measuring the temperature of the air from the ground to about 8km up. It is not the same as what the BOM measures on the ground, but in theory, according to the climate models, the troposphere should warm faster than the ground. (That’s very central to the amplification of effect of CO2, it is the missing hot spot, the fingerprint of CO2).
The BOM data is below (be aware it covers a different time period starting in 1910.)
Still, if you have to run for the not so low-lying hills in the background, perhaps the shiny black sea-walls might still be useful.
But this is what it’s all about. Pacific Islanders play the game, speak the fear, and admonish those who don’t buy them enough goodies. The Chinese heroes offer nice cars and a sports centre. (That’ll really slow the seas and save the corals).
Turnbull turns up to give away $80 million extra dollars of other people’s money, the islanders seem happy, and he is nearly sorta forgiven by the ABC.
It’s hard not to be afraid of climate change when you get free cars.
Nearby stood a shiny new fleet of MG SUVs, gifted by China to Micronesia to ferry about the leaders and assorted dignitaries from the forum’s 16 countries.
Someone needs to manage the Internet, and come September 30, no one is quite sure who will be. Sounds bizarre — an entity worth millions?
Once upon a time, a guy called Jon Postel managed the Net (all the domain names) but he died in 1998 and that job went to ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Since 1998, that’s been a part of the US Dept of Commerce. They get to decide who gets to use all the dot-somethings (eg, .com, .au, .cpa). ICANN can award them to groups or run an auction and pocket that cash. It is a monopoly, and there are conflicts there. The contract with the Dept of Commerce expires on Sept 30. In a normal world you’d expect the superpower-in-charge to roll that one over unless there was a big payoff for letting it go, or a foreign army on the beaches.
If the US government isn’t in control of ICANN, it can’t run as a separate monopoly thanks to US antitrust laws. So immediately ICANN is set “free” it will need to find a government to adopt it, so it has exemption from anti-trust laws (and more to the point, so it is accountable to something). But when it comes to government, there are a lot of bad choices. The obvious choice is you-know-what, the global bureaucracy that isn’t elected, and never gets held to account. Come October 1 this year (a mere three weeks away) the UN may get control over… the internet. Scary? I think so.
The only thing worse than a monopoly overseen by the U.S. government is a monopoly overseen by no one—or by a Web-censoring U.N. Congress still has time to extend its ban on the Obama administration giving up protection of the internet. Icann has given it every reason to do so.
The Wall Street Journal reported that apparently the Obama administration has no plan for what happens to ICANN on October 1. That seems hard to believe…
Without the U.S. contract, Icann would seek to be overseen by another governmental group so as to keep its antitrust exemption. Authoritarian regimes have already proposed Icann become part of the U.N. to make it easier for them to censor the internet globally. So much for the Obama pledge that the U.S. would never be replaced by a “government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution.”
Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government, called it “simply stunning” that the “politically blinded Obama administration missed the obvious point that Icann loses its antitrust shield should the government relinquish control.”
The other side of the debate is also at The Wall St Journal: Who will oversee the Internet. Gautham Nagesh argues that it’s no big deal, the UN won’t get control, and we should relax and be calm. But I didn’t find this soothing:
Mr. Larry Strickling [head of Commerce Dept] said he’s confident that a solution can be reached; the implication is that the U.S. is not going to back out unless it’s sure another government-led organization isn’t going to take its place.
So three weeks to go, and we’ll be protected by Larry’s sense of “sure-ness”?
And if it’s not the UN, it will still be “like” the UN — global, unaccountable and prone to corruption. Think IOC. Think FIFA.
The U.N. could filter and vet, Those who challenge their views on the Net, As with text-books, revised, For the youth, sanitized, To remove any skeptical threat.
— Ruairi
But Why?
The part of the equation that doesn’t make sense to me is why the US would give this up. What’s the US getting in return? This below, is the best answer I could find. If this is it, we’re in deep trouble:
So why is this happening? Couldn’t they just leave things the way they were? The main goal is to reassure other countries that the U.S. isn’t secretly controlling the structure of the Internet. To the extent American businesses have been damaged by the Edward Snowden disclosures, especially those offering cloud and other online services, this is a move aimed at repairing the relationship between the U.S. and other countries on Internet issues.
Make no mistake, this is a concession by the U.S. While the Commerce Department rarely intervened publicly in ICANN’s affairs, the implicit threat of its ability to do so will be gone. That could have an unforeseen impact in the future, particularly if cyberweapons continue to play a larger role in military and counter-intelligence activities.
Apparently the US is making this big concession to earn symbolic brownie points in the reassurance and relationships stakes. It sounds a lot like paying billions to try to change the weather. Symbolic.
For those opposing the overreach of Big Government, our best asset is free speech — The Internet. As long as we have the Net, we can fight back.
The current state of play in the EU, thanks to the GWPF: The Germans have quietly given up on their own hard climate targets. They have 30% renewables, the most expensive electrons in the world, and their emissions are about the same as five years ago. The EU, climate champion, can’t even agree among the member states about how to ratify the Paris Agreement. Meanwhile the Turks are planning to build 80 new coal fired power stations (eighty!) and are subsidizing them up the kazoo. Turkey wants to use its low grade lignite deposits instead of Russian gas. After the recent purges, no one wants to criticize Erdogan, plus the energy minister happens to be President Erdogans son-in-law.
The E.U.’s over-arching ambitions,
To change climate by cutting emissions,
Is a pointless own-goal,
When others use coal,
As they please,and with no inhibitions.
— Ruairi
Greens are angry that Germany dropped real targets in Climate Action Plan — call new plan a “Toothless-tiger-skin-rug”:
[CleanEnergyWire] The final version of the German Environment Ministry’s Climate Action Plan has been published. But concrete targets included in previous drafts have been removed, prompting the Green Party to describe the document as an “admission of government failure”.
Germany is already struggling to meet its 2020 climate targets, and is under additional pressure after Chancellor Angela Merkel repeatedly said she would make climate policy a priority of Germany’s G20 presidency next year.
But the Green Party and environmental organisations said the Climate Action Plan has lost all power as a blueprint for decarbonising Germany.
“Hendrick’s Climate Action Plan started as a tiger, but turned out to be a toothless tiger-skin rug,” said Green parliamentarians Bärbel Höhn and Oliver Krischer.
Germany increased power production from renewables to over 30 percent in 2015, yet overall CO2 emissions, as well as emissions from the power and transport sector, have stagnated or increased slightly over the last five years.
The EU is running at full Gigacrat speed — the velocity of bureaucrats in a vacuum:
The inability of the EU’s member states to agree on an effort-sharing deal could delay the ratification of the Paris Agreement until late 2017. This would see the climate deal enter into force without the world’s biggest economic bloc.
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