Remember the fear of global warming is falling because skeptics are well organized and well funded by vested interests and, after all, the US government is only spending ten thousand times more than Heartland. How could they compete?
The Congressional Research Service estimates that since 2008 the federal government has spent nearly $70 billion on “climate change activities.”
Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe presented the new CRS report on the Senate Floor Thursday to make the point that the Obama administration has been focused on “green” defense projects to the detriment of the military.
Hello to all the fans of global warming who know they are right because no matter how reasonable JoNova appears to be, no matter how convincing those graphs are, she “must be paid by Big-Energy”*. I know this post won’t make the slightest, infinitesimally small difference to you, because it was never about evidence anyway, was it? There’s no evidence skeptics were well funded, just like there is no evidence of that positive feedback in the models.
But sometime, somewhere (it’s coming) the world will wake up and realize that climate cash was not just a moneystream but an ocean. Climate funding is so large, there is not just a flow but currents, waves and tidal ebbs. Not to mention the sharks.
Seventy billion dollars and in just four, that’s “4”, years. What could possibly go wrong?
UPDATE: Table 5. Budget Authority for All Reported Climate Change Programs
Golly, but The Heretic is a play that appears to be genuinely useful art, something that actually challenges the paradigm. Brice Bosnich reviews it (see below), Andrew Glikson rails against it (so, it must be useful).
Glikson says, rightly: “Opinion and “belief” are no substitute for evidence. Those who doubt the basic laws of nature and empirical data are always welcome to submit research to peer review journals…”
To which Jo Nova says to Dr Andrew Glikson, “Skeptics can name 900 papers that support our views. And you still haven’t found that one mystery paper with observations that suggests CO2’s effect will be catastrophic eh? Is there any evidence?“
Glikson can name (as he did in our debate) hundreds of papers that are irrelevant, not based on observations, or are based on a logical fallacy. Climate models are not observations of the real world. Glikson’s faith in his theory is unscientific.
Before Glikson demands we disprove him (and we can) he needs to show he has some observations that support him. Until then, man-made global warming is just another religion.
Jo
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Guest Post: Brice Bosnich
Just back from seeing The Heretic in Melbourne on Tuesday. The theater was full. This is my reaction.
a) Leaving aside the scientific message, I would score the play as a 7.5 out of 10, where 10 is metaphysical perfection.
b) It is set in an earth science department, recently retooled as climate science, of a British university.
c) A cast of 6 is involved; a female faculty member (lecturer?) and her daughter, an anorexic greenie going though youthful rebellion, a male student who is green but delights in scientific rationality, a former military type janitor whose reason for existence in the play remains obscure to me, a human resources female and the male professor of the department.
d) The play is dominated by the female faculty member.
e) The female faculty member and the professor did a fine job of their parts, the anorexic and the male student did an awful lot of shouting as a substitute for acting subtlety and the human resources women, although appropriately over-painted and over-dressed, was not sufficiently desiccated to be truly representative.
f) The play opens showing a white board (Panasonic!) on which is written the (accepted) logarithmic relationship between CO2 concentration and forcing. The science described in the play is remarkably accurate.
g) The female faculty member finds the theory of AGW and its purported consequences to be unsupported by facts. Her professor, although probably sharing a similar view, adheres to the official line because of the considerable advantages he sees for himself and his department and the nasty consequences of not toeing the line.
h) Whereas the professor could reluctantly live with the faculty member’s conclusions, he is outraged when she expresses them to her students in class and, worse, on TV.
i) As a consequence the professor attempts to get rid of the heretic, with the help of human resources.
j) Although the lecturer gets death threats, human resources does nothing. The military type janitor seems to be involved with the death threats.
k) The rest of the play is about the interactions between the various actors.
My wife who is not a scientist found some of science talk in the play obscure, eg linear versus logarithmic relationships etc. As I said, I did not find the play especially engaging, but as an accurate representation of the state and politics of climate science it was right on the money. As Dr Johnson said about Scotland, “Sir, it was worth seeing, but it was not worth going to see.” (We drove from Canberra!)
Cheers,
Brice
(Professor Brice Bosnich, FRS, is Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Professor in Chemistry at The University of Chicago, Emeritus, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Chemistry, The Australian National University. Prof Bosnich was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2000.)
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Dr Andrew Glikson objects to The Heretic in a letter to its author
Mr Richard Bean
Director
Melbourne Theatre Company
Dear Mr Richard Bean
As an Earth and paleo-climate scientist of some 45 years-long experience and more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, I suggest the show “The Heretic”, which I have not seen but about which I have read, can only lead to trivialization and further denial of what the scientific world regards as the greatest threat humanity and nature are facing.
I suggest the show plays into the hands of those who support the use of the thin terrestrial atmosphere (breathable thickness of less than 10 km) for further carbon emission on top of the 350 billion tons of carbon already emitted since the 18th century and >150 billion tons carbon released by land clearing, fires etc.. As shown in my enclosed paper, the pace of CO2 rise over the last 40 years, recently reaching >2 ppm CO2/year, has now exceeded any recorded for the last 65 million years, while the atmospheric level of 394 ppm CO2 is now near that of the warm Pliocene era some 3 million years-ago. Our empirical evidence is based on direct observations of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere system by the world’s climate monitoring bodies – including NOAA, NASA, NSIDC, Hadley-MET, Tyndale, Potsdam, CSIRO, BOM and other.
Opinion and “belief” are no substitute for evidence. Those who doubt the basic laws of nature and empirical data are always welcome to submit research to peer review journals where their papers will be treated the same as any other. In so far as their propositions are upheld, anyone who is able to demonstrate as if:
The Earth’s climate is not warming, or
The anthropogenic release of >500 billion tons of carbon since the 18th century is not the primary factor responsible for global warming
is bound to receive the highest accolades.
I wonder whether such a show, if concerned with denial of the holocaust of world war II, would have been conceived?
I suggest that, given the threat of anthropogenic global warming to the terrestrial climate and to marine ecosystems, a theatric show making mockery of the gravity of the climate issue for future generations can only be seriously mistaken.
Yours sincerely
Andrew Glikson
Earth and paleo-climate scientist
Australian National University
This is part of a series that Tony Cox and I are doing that drills down to the most important points and papers, with proper references, as a definitive resource.The models are wrong: not just “unverified”, not just “uncertain”, but proven to have failed. — Jo
Joint Post: Tony Cox and Jo Nova
Across different regions, and different time-spans over the last century, the models fail.
Koutsoyiannis and Anagnostopolous et al show those models can’t model the recent century, and because the models fail to predict regional and smaller scale effects it’s impossible that they could predict longer and global values.[i]
On 30 year time frames, the original observations are nothing like the models projections on a local scale. (Click to enlarge).
The models should retrospectively match the actual temperature over the past 100 years. This test of retrospectivity is called hindcasting. If a model has valid assumptions about the climatic effect of variables such as greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, then the model should be able to match past known data.
“…all the models were “irrelevant with reality” at the 30 year climate scale…”
When tested, the global climate models failed to hindcast the climate at 55 locations around the world. The models were even worse at reproducing what happened across 70 sites spread throughout continental USA. Their outputs show the models are unable to model the known climate.
70 sites were used around the US. Models couldn’t model this size region accurately. (Click to enlarge)
The litany chants“The Debate is over”, but hey where was that debate?
Could the Nova Glikson “Great Debate” be it? Surely not, you think, but debates in “climate science” are high stakes affairs, where branded climate scientists will not publicly debate well known skeptics. They know they can’t win. Instead, the closest thing we get to a real debate is a kind of debate by proxy. The heavyweights on the establishment side pretend to be above it all, but of course, they are only an email away from the man on the front line.
What started as a single pair of “Yes”, then “No” articles that started on Quadrant become a five part saga lasting more than a month. I’ve compiled it all into a PDF which can be printed or read from start to finish, and might be just the thing for fence sitters who like to read. Some people really hanker after the “back-and-forwards” answer and question format. For those that missed it, two years on, the Great Debate still remains a rare example where two opponents actually drilled down to the points that matter.
To Andrew Glickson’s credit, he did not knock back the challenge with the usual “I only debate real climate scientists” — which automatically rules out most of the competition and leaves them debating other government funded establishment “thinkers” who also haven’t disagreed with the meme and been sacked, sabotaged or retired out of frustration.
Dr Glikson is a paleoclimatologist who works at Australian National University along with Will Steffen and the Climate Institute. I’m a blogger with questions he can’t answer. He’s connected via email with most of the team of so called expert climate scientists in Australia. I’m widely read and networked with people who don’t take anyone’s word for it.
When a science theory is monopolistically funded, the normal competition in science is hobbled. So the internet becomes the front line: where the ruling establishment meets free wits.
As it happens the online format is arguably the most powerful method for getting to the truth. There are no limits on space or time, both sides can use as many graphs and references as they want, and can “phone a friend” ad lib. It doesn’t depend on “showmanship”, nor on an ambush, and everyone has infinite right of reply.
It came about because Dr Andrew Glikson requested space for a one off article on Quadrant and the editor, Michael Connor, agreed, and then approached me to write a reply. The debate went through five rounds (one round, possibly the key point, came out in comments). Dr Glikson asked to reply the sixth time. I welcomed it, but two years later, it still hasn’t arrived.
If I can only post one exchange to sum it up — this was in my final reply, summing up the paleoclimatic evidence Dr Glikson had put forwards.
Dr Andrew Glikson: Studies from 3 million to 500 million years ago show that when volcanoes blow up or asteroids hit, CO2 levels rise and animals die
Jo Nova: Yes. That’d be because both those events are God-awful, destructive things that dump mountains of ash in the atmosphere. The ash cools the planet. Cold times are horrid for life on earth. Animals die en masse. Tsunamis, dust and lava are none too friendly either. The CO2 effect is a mere rider of correlation, and correlation is not causation.
We know (as I’ve said before) that colder oceans suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. We would be shocked (shocked!) if the geological record didn’t show a correlation between temperature and CO2. Temperature drives CO2.
Read the caption on Figure 1. “Dating errors are typically less than ±1 Myr.” We’re hunting for an effect that ought to happen in days, weeks and months, with some result within decades, and the graph we’re looking at resolves things to plus or minus one million years. We’re searching for nanotubes in a hay stack, and we’ve only got our bifocals.
I’m travelling interstate at the moment, and with site maintenance being rather larger than usual, apologies for things being thin on the ground here. I have finally got email working again, and have been following the ever entertaining antics of the death threats that werent, the gun licence that wasn’t, and the accurate, restrained and well mannered scientists who aren’t accurate, restrained orwell mannered. I will be posting more soon.
Robert Wenzel says to Federal Reserve: “Leave the Building to the Four-Legged Rats”
Finally a speech with attitude tells it like it is, at the US Federal Reserve. The speech was given by blogger Robert Wenzel in late April to the New York Federal Reserve Bank, because they invited him to speak. It deserves a read — a man who knows the details tallies up the score, and politely lays out the contradictions of the Federal Reserve at point blank range.
But it is much more than that. For the US Federal Reserve to invite Wenzel to explain Austrian economics to them is like “the team” in Australia inviting me along for lunch at the Department of Climate Change to explain why the CO2 theory ain’t too hot. If that happened (as if), what would I say? This is the nature of the choice that Wenzel faced. A slam-dunk, in the nicest possible way.
The convergence of common sense: Austrians are the skeptics of economics
Wenzel is an Austrian economist, which is like being a climate skeptic in climate change. In the 1930s, Keynesian economics took over from classical economics among the central banks and governments, then academia, and by 1970s, in the words of Richard Nixon, “We are all Keynesians now”. Well not quite. Austrian economics came into existence around 1930, in response to the monetary upheaval. It is similar to classical economics but with a better understanding of the business cycle and monetary theory. It makes sense, fits the facts, and the man in the street can point out mistakes made by the elite. Since the Internet started, it has enjoyed a revival. A huge revival.
Keynesian economics was essentially an elaborate excuse to lower interest rates in the 1930s, basically because the banks were about to go bust. The main assets of banks at the time were bonds, which are worth more if interest rates are lower. And governments love lower interest rates, because that creates more money (who wants to be disciplined eh?). Loose Money means Loose Legislators. It appears to boost short term demand, and that makes influential businessmen and other recipients of the new money very happy. Governments can avoid hard calls on welfare. (Everyone seems to get a free lunch — everyone except the hardest workers and diligent savers.) Another part of the problem of the 1930s was that there wasn’t enough money around — some towns literally had no money to circulate — so schemes to hand out money by burying it in bottles and having people dig it up had a certain logic — indeed, they weren’t any different from giving tax refunds to people who didn’t pay tax, except that people who dug for bottles of cash got fitter. But schemes to simulate demand were perversely backwards: corn prices would rise if we stop farmers from farming, wages would rise if we legislated it (but jobs would be lost). A proliferation of government boards made the economy bureaucratic, but ultimately prevented the US from recovering as quickly from the 1929 shock like the rest of the western world.
But what is good for banks and government isn’t necessarily good for the economy. Keynesian economics were considered crackpot by the standards of the day and by classical economists. Ever noticed how Keynesian economics never quite seems to make sense, explanations are often complicated and unfinished, and Keynesian commentators like Paul Krugman of the NYT or Ross Gittins of the SMH are always contradicting themselves two years later? Keynesian economics was a radical and “counter intuitive” economic response, that made little sense to experts at the time, but governments and banks loved it.
So how did it become the orthodoxy? Same as the CO2 theory of climate. Government adopted it, force fed its practitioners money via plum jobs and consultancies, while quietly ignoring and starving its opponents. The central banks adopted it, and they fund much of the research work at universities. By the 1950’s you could only get a PhD in economics if you were a Keynesian, because outside money to the economics department came from organizations that preferred Keynesian for political reasons, and it pretty much still that way. Anyone with a PhD in economics is a Keynesian, with rare exceptions. Nearly all the interesting consulting jobs in economics come from central and commercial banks, and they strongly support Keynesian economics. Like being a climate skeptic in climate science, being an Austrian economist is very career limiting.
Keynesian economics and the CO2 theory of global warming are Big Game hunting arenas for people seeking power, control and buckets of cash. In both areas, Big Government is one of the hunters. Same mechanisms, same practitioners, same beneficiaries. And both came unstuck starting around 1999 because the nonsense was progressively unmasked on the Internet. Which is why Austrian economics and climate skepticism are on a hot-ticket convergence at the moment as two audiences of reality-lovin’ net-heads cross paths.
I think Keynsianism is the tempting path to tyranny, but Keynes himself was no fool. There is a very strong account that when he we was near death he essentially told a visitor that his theory was just a response to the particular political conditions of the 1930s, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously in other contexts. Modern Keynesians vehemently deny this, of course.
The period 1982 to 2007 saw a huge build up in debt as money creation took off, with low interest rates and relaxed banking rules, just like the last time — 1920 to 1929, after the creation of the Fed and after WWI was out of the way. That bubble ended in a serious deflationary contraction 1929 – 1931. Bernanke, a student of the period, has vowed not to let the same happen again. Which is why the Federal Reserve, and other central banks, can be relied upon to print as required this time around, not to let our money/debt bubble deflate. Instead they will inflate away the debt, like a prolonged version of the 1970s. The investing world is only starting to work this out. Like Wenzel (and Murdoch) have been saying, there is a great deal of inflation dead ahead. Are your investments ready for that? See, these arcane arguments can really matter!
Please allow me to begin with methodology, I hold the view developed by such great economic thinkers as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard that there are no constants in the science of economics similar to those in the physical sciences.
In the science of physics, we know that water freezes at 32 degrees. We can predict with immense accuracy exactly how far a rocket ship will travel filled with 500 gallons of fuel. There is preciseness because there are constants, which do not change and upon which equations can be constructed..
There are no such constants in the field of economics since the science of economics deals with human action, which can change at any time. If potato prices remain the same for 10 weeks, it does not mean they will be the same the following day. I defy anyone in this room to provide me with a constant in the field of economics that has the same unchanging constancy that exists in the fields of physics or chemistry.
And yet, in paper after paper here at the Federal Reserve, I see equations built as though constants do exist. …
Apologies for the inconvenience. Unfortunately sometime this week the site will be offline for some hours (up to one day). This move is in an effort to reduce costs. Thanks to a generous offer from a reader (thank you David) for the suggestion. I hadn’t been paying attention, and bandwidth charges had rather surprized me. (Don’t miss the post on the ARC funding that I just put up too). Jo
PS: People emailing me during this day will have trouble. Please save those emails and send them again in a day or two.
Australian Taxpayer funds in 2012 are supporting around 50 projects about “climate change” or “greenhouse gases”.
One David McKnight has got $95k to study how Australian governments “spin” the news. So which cancer research project was knocked back so he could study a “hyper-adversarial” news system? And what is so bad about a competitive news system in any case? What are we aiming for — real news or better propaganda? (See my response to David McKnight in The Australian to see how confused this journalism lecturer is.)
The dollar values here are usually for three year projects. Some of these projects potentially produce press releases which are nothing more than disguised forms of government advertising for big-spending climate policies.
The ARC (Australian Research Council) is the main source of funding for all researchers in all fields of natural, political and social sciences. Getting a grant will make a difference between carrying on doing research and finding another job, for many researchers. Take a look, for example, at the abstracts of the winning Discovery Projects.
I counted at least 50 winning projects with the magic words “climate change” or greenhouse gas emission in them (compared with about 10 astronomy projects, and 19 cancer research projects, for example). “Climate change” projects raked up $16 million in the Discovery category alone.
There’s a handful of them. But there are projects listed as geography, biology, film & digital media, oceanography, journalism, civil engineering, statistics, applied maths, soil science, political science, physiology, geology, archaeology, literary studies, psychology, econometrics, and more… all claiming in their 3-line abstracts that their various pet projects are going to help us understand, fight, adapt for, convince people of climate change. There’s one grant proposal that starts with the words “climate change represents a moral challenge to humanity“: it won a cute $200,000, no need to read more. There’s one that promises to study how oysters can be made resilient to climate change: here’s $285,000 coming their way. A $320,000 civil engineering research proposal informs us that “evidence” shows how floods and rains are getting worse because of global warming. Another one got $250,000 for drafting recommendations to achieve “climate justice” (whatever that is); expensive, yes, but do you want to put a price on justice? Then there’s a physiology professor at Sydney Uni who got $370,000 for a 3-year project that “will show to what extent individuals can compensate for temperature changes, and thereby render populations resilient to climate change” (I put on my sweater; I take it off. There, I have just saved you 3 years of work and $370,000).
For the old school Marxists, there’s a $239,000 Monash (where else?) project that will “develop a new cultural materialist paradigm” applied to science-fiction representations of extreme climate change. And we cannot miss a $314,000 Monash grant to study how climate change is shrinking birds (in California, climate change is making birds bigger, but never mind). A group of civil engineers got $320,000 for developing light-gauge steel roofing systems: they were clever enough to say that we need steel roofing to increase building resistance against “extreme wind events caused by climate change”. $100,000 went to two Queensland sociologists who will study how to guarantee “food security in Australia in an era of climate change” through “a multiplicity of agencies” (well, at least these two chaps have got food security for a couple of years).
Even most skeptics agree that the world has been warming during the last 50 years, but there is apparently no significant underlying warming trend in 46 out of 47 years of data. Something decidedly unusual happened to the world in 1977 and we don’t know for sure what it was. The world got warmer, and the change “stuck”. But there were no extra emissions of CO2 in that year, so there is no reason to pin this to CO2.
It’s difficult to believe we are not sure – but the last 50 years of warming trend depends on that single stepwise leap in 1977. Look at the graph below. Does it show one strong underlying warming trend, or is it really a trend so insignificant that it wouldn’t exist if there was not a step change that artificially bolstered it?
A series of two flat lines can appear to be a continuous warming trend if a linear trend line is fitted because it ignores the step change. McKitrick and Voselgang
This step effect was first noted by David Stockwell in 2009
The continuous warming appears to be obvious in the records of the lower atmosphere when we draw a linear trend line.
McKitrick and Voselgang (click to enlarge)
But look again at the data, allowing for the step-change in 1977.
Tim Flannery is paid to help you understand why Australia is getting a Carbon Tax in eight weeks time. If you can’t fathom why the nation which emits just 1.3% of all man-made CO2 is going to pay three times the current market rate to reduce world temperatures by 0.00 degrees C, I’m sure Prof Tim will be delighted to help. Do book quickly. Sometimes these events sell out (even before they are publicized).
Australia’s Chief Climate Commissioner, Professor Tim Flannery, is visiting Sydney. The sixth biggest CBD in the country, Parramatta will host the next public forum for the Climate Commission. This is your opportunity to get involved in the conversation about climate change.
The Climate Commission provides independent, authoritative information on climate change to the Australian public.
Event details
Where: Parramatta RSL club , Cnr Macquarie & O’Connell St , Parramatta
When: 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM, Tuesday 15 May 2012. Doors open 6.00pm
Everyone is welcome. Book your place now to avoid disappointment.
What would you like to ask Tim in our National Climate Conversation?
Perhaps you wonder why he keeps calling us names?
Maybe you can’t figure out how the Climate Commission can call themselves “independent” when it’s funded by The Government?
Perhaps you’d like to see a real debate instead of just being told “there isn’t one”.
Could it be that the compelling case to sacrifice billions to “lead the way” to escapes you? You wonder why we don’t spend that money planting trees, curing cancer, or feeding kids in Chad? Better to let them starve eh?
The Clean-Energy-Future-Fund tells households theydon’t have to pay the carbon tax (because it only applies to evil corporations). If we don’t have to pay, which part of our electricity bill do we ignore?
Here’s a character test on climate scientists and some of the media. It tells us much how concerned they are about truth, and how willing they are to be gullible fools, to have manners, decency, to milk even the most vaporous wisp of evidence into a national headline. Credit to Simon Turnill and The Australian which put the news on the front page today. At least one paper is working to correct the record.
Character is destiny. Can people who do not care about the truth be trusted on any issue?
How bad were those threats? What threats?
According to Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim, the 11 documents “do not contain threats to kill” and the other “could be regarded as intimidating and at its highest perhaps alluding to a threat”. [The Australian]
What kind of evidence does a climate scientist need to issue a press release?
Answer: none at all.
How important is accuracy to our climate scientists?
How reasonable, rational and accurate are climate scientists like Will Steffen, Andy Pitman, David Karoly? Billions of dollars depends on their judgement, and what we find as we study the evidence, is that knowing what we know now, and quoting their own words, they either set out to deceive the public in order to smear those who disagree with them, or their judgement is seriously questionable — almost delusional. Our Chief Scientists admits he did not read the email threats himself before doing all those media interviews. What ho? He’s been caught here, but he also admits he does not know the evidence for climate change either. He trusts the opinion of these same scientists who either have little integrity or are completely irrational.
The evidence suggests they lack scruples and honesty. The serial exaggerators hide the data. When asked to provide examples they post weak excuses and try to prevent people seeing the evidence.
Remember that even if real death threats turn up (and I sincerely hope they don’t), nothing after the fact can change the truth that climate scientists like Will Steffen Andy Pitman, David Karoly felt no obligation to tell the Australian taxpayers the whole story. They are happy to stoop to smearing opponents. It’s more proof that they have no evidence, and resort to smears to win sympathy and distract the public from their vaporous case.
For the record: How 11 rude emails became a national media blitz
After receiving 11 rude emails, the ANU scientists issued media alerts calling them “death threats”, saying that they were so serious they’d moved the scientists to safer locations, they were switching to unlisted home numbers, deleting social media profiles that had been defaced. It was “intolerable” and they were shaking with fear.
After being asked via FOI to provide the “death threats” they hid them, improbably claiming their were privacy issues, and the release of 11 crude emails (with details redacted) may “endanger the life or physical safety of any person”.
Pathological exaggerators? Lets quote their exact words:
Will Steffen, head of the Climate Institute and paid thousands of dollars to advise on billion dollar policies, appears unable to tell the difference between a bad mannered email and a direct threat of violence. Just how good is his judgement on the finer points of feedback loops in complex models?
Professor Will Steffen, of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute, said some were direct threats of violence, while others were ”simply very nasty emails with veiled threats in them that what might happen to us in a very general way”.Canberra Times
The serial exaggerators tossing baseless ad hominem smears then called for a “logical public debate” about the science.
Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University, Professor Ian Young, said staff should not have to put up with such behaviour. “Professor Young says the outrageous behaviour [of receiving 11 rude emails] has left the scientists shaken.” “These are issues where we should have a logical public debate …” [ABC]
Prof David Karoly, of the University of Melbourne’s school of Earth science took the opportunity to suggest the 11 rude emails could be an organized campaign:
“It is clear that there is a campaign in terms of either organised or disorganised threats to discourage scientists from presenting the best available climate science on television or radio,” he said.
According to Andrew Macintosh, the 11 emails were an acceleration of a campaign running for years (What? Perhaps there was one email 5 years ago, and another 18 months ago? That bad eh?)
“Andrew Macintosh, associate director of the ANU Centre for Climate Law and Policy, said the scientists had been targeted for years but it had worsened. ”I received a few a couple of years ago. It was three letters, with pictures of dead animals and print cut out from newspapers. There was a variety of ways I was going to die. They were going to shoot me, gut me and so on. Since then I’ve had lots of abusive emails and phone calls.” [ canberra times]
Instead of informing Canberran’s that the ANU had not reported the rude emails to police, journalist Eamonn Duff at The Canberra Times phrased it as such: “Federal police said they were aware of the issue.” A hired PR agent could hardly do better.
Not surprisingly Julia Gillard blamed Abbott:
Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the plunge in debate should be blamed on the Opposition’s preparedness to ”abuse scientists”. canberratimes
Have the 1990 IPCC predictions been proved completely, unarguably and utterly wrong? Yes.
They predicted that if our emissions stayed the same, temperatures would rise by 0.3 C per decade, and would be at the very least 0.2, and the most 0.5. Even by the most generous rehash of the data, the highest rate they can find is 0.18 C per decade which is likely an overestimate, and in any case, is below the very least estimate, despite the world’s emissions of CO2 continuing ever higher.
Climate Scientist Matthew England called that “very accurate”. Since when did 0.18 = 0.3? (Shall we call it “climate maths”, or just call it wrong?) The IPCC had a whole barn wall to aim at, and a battalion of government funded gold plated AK-47s to hit the target, but they still missed.
The un-Skepticalscience page uses a pea and thimble trick to argue the IPCC 1990 predictions were right (“Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: IPCC FAR”). As usual John Cooks site looks “technical” but uses complexity to hide the way they redefined the prediction in order to pretend it wasn’t wrong. Excuses excuses. Intellectual wordsmiths who bore you to death.
The un-Skepticalscience page essentially says that GHG forcing was lower than the IPCC predicted. So if you allow for the fact that the IPCC got the future concentration of CO2 wrong, then, hey, really their models are “very accurate”. Figure that estimating the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is far simpler chemistry and much less complex than getting the whole kit and caboodle of a climate model to work. If the IPCC don’t even know how big the sinks and sources of CO2 are, why would anyone trust them to get a multivariate equation with clouds, rain and ocean-turnover right?
Here’s how you can spot the pea-and-thimble trick in the un-SkepticalScience site:
1/ There is no direct quote of the IPCC prediction.
2/ The IPCC used the term “prediction” — but unskeptical science repeatedly used the term “projection”. They even retitle graphs.
3/ They didn’t use the original captions on the graphs, instead writing their own.
4/ The IPCC talked of “emissions” leading to a temperature rise. Skeptical Science talks of “radiative forcing”. (A clue, emissions are measured in gigatons, not in W/m2. The SkS page is discussing something other than the main point.)
But if you were a casual reader you wouldn’t know that unless you bothered to be skeptical, and go to the source to check.
Let’s quote the IPCC Prediction:
“If emissions follow a Business-as-usual pattern
Under the IPCC Business as Usual emissions of greenhouse gases the average rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century is estimated to be 0.3C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2C – 0.5C)” [IPCC FAR summary]
Note the wording is a prediction about “emissions” leading to warming. Radiative forcings are a subpart of the big picture, but “Business As Usual” means emissions as usual (and for 1990), not final CO2 ppm values “as usual” or radiative forcings “as usual”. We judge the prediction by the terms they set, not post hoc ignoring the parts that fail, cherry picking something they accidentally may have got right, and then calling it all “very accurate”. It’s not even a tiny bit “accurate”. The world has been warming for 300 years, so to say it will keep warming is the most obvious forecast, and that’s what happened. The favourite horse won.
Sometimes the IPCC gets it right (accidents do happen)
The IPCC actually thought that sticking with “100% of 1990 emissions” would lead to 390ppm Co2 or so by 2012. But our emissions were 25% higher by 2012, so you’d think atmospheric CO2 would be higher too. But no, in the end result was… accidentally, 390ppm. See Fig 4 FAR summary page xvii.
Fig 4 IPCC FAR summary. Note the words “100% 1990 emissions” which was supposed to lead to CO2 levels reaching 390ppm by 2010. (Click to enlarge and see the 2012 prediction point marked)
The game is up when everyone knows the only way out is printing money, because then everyone knows inflation is coming, and the bun-fight begins. Everyone wants the wage rise, the payment now, and to buy the commodities that they won’t be able to afford tomorrow. Price tags begin that rising spiral. I don’t think we are on the verge just yet, but it can’t be that far when someone like Murdoch is broadcasting it.
Rupert Murdoch tweets:
@rupertmurdoch
Governments worldwide have borrowed 100 trillion last ten years. Defaults inevitable sometime soon. Means crash, hurting rich and poor.
@rupertmurdoch
Of course markets stay high with central banks printing huge sums, inflating everything except jobs.
The only question that matters then, is are they “printing”, and how long have we got?
US Money Base Figures
This is the US money base, starting in 1918.
You can see the moment Lehman Brothers went under. It’s that “bend”.
..
That graph again, logarithmically, so we can put the last 90 years in perspective. Remember the oil crisis, the Vietnam War, the 1987 crash, LTCM, and the dot com burst? They don’t rate.
The depression and World War II — they did rate — and you can see below, that this latest “bump” is… err, steeper. (Don’t we all feel good about that eh?) If you are looking at these graphs for the first time and feeling queasy, good news, you might be sane. If you wonder why I’m not leaping up and down, pointing out that the current monetary hiccup is worse than World War II fergoodnesssake, where some 400,000 US citizens died, it’s only because we’ve been watching this trainwreck for three years. (See Helicopter Ben at work, Nov 2008)
Even if you aren’t in Australia, you can’t help but find the Australian Parliament the best reality TV show on the box anywhere.
The background: Our Leftie Labor Government was elected with a roughly equal tally of seats as the right leaning coalition, in late 2010. It was such a knife edge, one Labor seat was won by just 400 votes (Corangamite). There were five independents, who would normally be as important as the wallpaper in the House, but suddenly had supreme power. Our PM Julia Gillard did deals to remake the entire national economy with the one Green member of parliament, promising everything he wanted and more for his vote, even though he would rather walk on glass that vote “right”. (And some say she’s a good negotiator?) She won the support, with deals, platitudes, and pork barreling promises of three of the other four independents — two of whom who were representing rural, conservative electorates, so they did exactly what the members of their own seats didn’t want (those same voters voted very conservatively in the Senate). The whole schmozzle of our hung Parliament is balanced on a knife edge. If only one independent switches support from Labor to the opposition, it’s all over.
Labor’s governing has been so flagrantly awful I’ve heard a story that a Labor branch leader got annoyed that people were suggesting Gillard was as bad as the infamous Whitlam government. (Whitlam et al were so bad they were “sacked” by a governor general in an unprecedented constitutional crisis). The Labor supporter thought Whitlam didn’t deserve to be put in the same category, “he had more class”.
Last week we finished some YouTube versions explaining the skeptical case. These grew out of the interview we did with Nick Minchin and Anna Rose for the ABC documentary I Can Change Your Mind. They are what we would have said, if we’d been editing the documentary :).
In the interview we were on a mission to show the evidence the ABC won’t show — and of course, true to form, the ABC did exactly that, and didn’t show it. As David often points out, the mainstream media have never shown this data anywhere in the world, ever, even though it is extremely relevant, from mankind’s best and latest instruments, from impeccable sources, and is publicly available. Not to mention that billions of dollars of public policies depend on getting this right either.
This is a strictly no-budget approach to organize the message for those on the web who prefer to see video’s rather than read papers. Here are three YouTube’s by David Evans, thanks to Barry Corke (for the filming and editing). I hear that one I did will be ready sometime.
A little background. When the documentary interview happened in our kitchen, we noticed something interesting. We felt the film crew, a producer and two camera people (dressed trendy, mainly in black, straight from Ultimo central casting) arrived expecting to find paid hacks, or slow moving ideologues who struggled to get a grip. It’s not that they said that of course, they were pro’s. But they had been hearing for years how we are evil shills for big tobacco and oil interests who were cynically only in it for the money. We stress they were professional and polite, and this isn’t in any way a complaint about them, but it was a distinct sense we had.
Then the interview happened. For two hours we presented evidence, determined to show graphs from respectable sources like NASA, photographs of actual thermometers, and had answers to absolutely everything and then some with details of scientific stuff like feedbacks and clouds. I took the predictable ad homs about funding, and turned the tables completely — we were the unfunded volunteers working for professional and patriotic duty against a wall of billions of dollars, while they lost data, hid methods, and called us names. I suppose they noticed we were a tad passionate, not cynical shills. Meanwhile Anna Rose came armed with print outs from DeSmog or Exxon secrets or some such and clearly had no idea of the science beyond the rudimentary: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, CO2 levels are rising, and it’s getting warmer, so how can you be a skeptic? (What’s a feedback?) She lived and breathed the postmodern view of science (climate scientists are the new Pope).
Sometime during this process the documentary crew started treating us with respect. After the interview, they even wanted to speak to us, not just the perfunctory things the situation demanded. We felt we had … changed their minds. Ok, we don’t hold any illusions it lasted long, and I suspect many audio and camera guys are closet skeptics to start with. Once they were back in ABC world among their friends and People Who Know Best, we are confident they went back to viewing us as untermenschen deceiving scum. But just for a moment there, some minds were changed.
The skeptical cameraman recording it all for us, Barry Corke, had a good view of the whole proceedings because once he set up his cameras he just sat back and watched. We asked him afterwards, and he had noticed the same phenomenon. And that’s where the idea of these YouTubes was born — if it worked on battled hardened culture warriors working for the ABC, perhaps the public might like to hear what we said?
No, this isn’t footage from the ABC documentary I Can Change Your Mind — that’s a very large file, and we are trying to condense it so it can appear in a complete but manageable form. Soon.
Bottom line: On Q&A Nick Minchin said the IPCC predictions were wrong. Matthew England said “Not true” their 1990 prediction was “very accurate”. But the IPCC predicted 0.3C per decade, and we got at most 0.18C per decade. (Forster and Rahmsdorf 2011 ) How is is “very accurate” when the result is below their lowest estimate?
Oceanographer Matthew England owes Nick Minchin an apology. Will Tony Jones correct the record on Monday?
How strange is this debate where politicians know the science better than the “scientists”?
The ABC Q&A program shows they have no interest in pursing the truth on climate change. The panel was, as always designed to push an agenda. Five believers, with a sixth in the audience, faced two skeptics. No skeptical scientists were invited to attend, let alone sit in the front row with a mike, like England who was called in so the warmists could get the last word on the science without fear that a skeptic might disputing their version of events. We can’t allow people to damage the faith of those duped ABC viewers.
Nick Minchin claimed there is a major problem with the warmists theory, that the predictions of the IPCC were wrong, because we have had rising CO2 in the last decade or more but “we haven’t had the commensurate rise in temperatures.”
Matthew England claims Minchin is wrong
“What Nick just said is actually not true. The IPCC projections from 1990 have borne out very accurately.” Source Q & A (36:30 mins)
Hmmm. Could “very accurately” be an exaggeration? Or is it possible England was getting his IPCC predictions mixed up? No. He really does mean the 1990 report, and he repeats the claim that the decadal trend fits.
“The projections are now 22 years old and the temperature record that we have does bounce around for year to year but that decade to decade progression that of warming that Megan just mentioned have occurred …”
The predictions from the IPCC First Assessment Report show England is wrong
Policy Makers Summary, Working Group I, page xxii.
Their prediction was that if we continue to emit CO2 at present rates the world will warm at about 0.3°C per decade, so by 2025 the world will have warmed by 1°C. That was looking 35 years ahead and we are now 22 years into that prediction. The world should be about 0.6°C warmer now than in 1990.
The lowest possible prediction is for a 0.2°C rise per decade.
Were CO2 emissions “business as usual”? No they were higher
The CO2 emissions (black dashed line) are equivalent to the highest projected by the IPCC. So the temperature should have risen faster than their lowest estimate.
Atmospheric CO₂ concentrations recorded at Mauna Loa (black dashed line) and as projected under six IPCC emission scenarios (coloured lines) (IPCC Data Distribution Centre)
Was warming since 1990 even close to the predicted 0.3°C per decade? No.
Foster and Rahmstorf 2011 looked at five temperature series and calculated trends from 0.14°C to 0.18°C per decade, lower than the 0.2°C per decade trend which marks the absolute bottom of the IPCC prediction. They are sympathetic to the IPCC aims. These values are as good as it gets for England. He fails.
Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) confirmed in 2010 that the decadal trends for the last 150 years peak at 0.16°C per decade.
According to the satellite data (the best and only source of unbiased data) the temperature trends in the last two decades was not even close to those predicted by the IPCC. For most of the last 20 years the temperature was well below the lowest predicted warming of 0.2°C per decade predicted for the “business as usual” plan. Look for yourself: the climate models and Matthew England are wrong, and Nick Minchin is right.
Figure 4: Predictions of the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990, compared to the subsequent temperatures as measured by NASA satellites (UAH Data). Graph by Dr David Evans
England was given a free kick at Minchin, who had no scientific support at the event at all
Minchin, undeservedly had to wear the false “correction” on national television. To put things right, to show the ABC is interested in the truth rather than just being an advertising agency for the government they need to correct the record.
In response to the ABC doco I Can Change Your Mind, the believers of man-made global warming are out attacking with logical fallacies, cherry picking deceit, and the usual barking mad irrelevant lines about tobacco and AIDS. Desperate eh?
Never before in one day on one post have I enjoyed responding to Mr Unskeptical himself (John Cook), as well as Stefan Lewandowsky (aka Lysenko-strikes-again) and Clive-break-democracy-Hamilton.
Cook is from the University of Queensland, and he runs the ambush site “Skeptical Science” (where even the name of the site is misleading, and where he dutifully parrots the government scientists).
John Cook
His litany of logical errors continues:
He’s still resorting to namecalling with a term he can’t define scientifically. Which paper do we deny John? You’ve had two years to find it, and you still can’t come up with anything better than papers which cheat by changing color schemes, or which use wind-shear instead of thermometers to measure temperature?
He’s clinging to that consensus, when evidence is what matters. The fallacy is known as argument from authority — but in science, authority is trumped by data. In contrast, I keep referring to 3,000 ocean bouys, 6,000 boreholes, and 28 million weather balloons that support the skeptics. The heat is not in the upper troposphere (the hot spot is missing), which wipes out the amplification and most of the warming in the climate models. Then there are the 900 or so peer reviewed papers that support the skeptical case.
His reasoning is so weak he thinks writing about tobacco funding and HIV will help us understand the climate. This is not just reasoning by analogy, but reasoning by unrelated events.
Cook still hauls out the discredited ad homs about funding, despite the fact it takes cherry picking extraordinaire to ignore that the funds to believer scientists outnumbers the funds to skeptics by 3,500:1, and the profits from climate trading vastly outweigh the losses the fossil fuel companies might take if the world took the alarmists seriously. Ever noticed how numerous and slick all those warmist pieces are on tv, newspapers, magazines, websites etc — and how sparse and homemade the media presence of skeptics in comparison? Who’s got the big budget, John?
“97 percent of climate experts say man-made global warming is a major threat”
The correct response: “So? The satellites, ocean buoys, and weather balloons disagree.”
The alarmists may have “experts”, but the skeptics have the data.
How do you find the truth about some disputed point in science? You find the most authoritative source of information. The vital thing that makes science different to a religion is that there are no “Gods” of science. There is no expert who is infallible. The highest authority in science is the measurements and observations. Here is the hierarchy of authority in climate science:
Data (empirical evidence)
Climate scientists
Other scientists
Lay people.
For most of the last few centuries, science has been supreme over politics for settling the truth in matters pertaining to the physical world—empirical evidence beats anyone’s say-so.
But the modern political approach is to ignore that top level. To most warmists and the public who “believe in climate change” (as they so misleading say), the hierarchy is:
Climate scientists
Other scientists
Lay people.
The way the climate scam works is for the like-minded western bureaucracies to be the only employers or funders of climate scientists—which eliminates most of the competition that would otherwise keep them scrupulously honest. While peer review (like the IPCC process) is treated as equivalent to the bible, it’s more like a report of a committee meeting (one that dissenters were not invited to). The government climate scientists use the peer review process to block criticism or alternative theories from being officially heard—as they were caught doing in the Climategate scandal. The mainstream media go to the climate scientists as their ultimate source of authority, and propagate their opinions to the public. Very neat.
It is a loophole in the modern world. The process is called “science”, but works like a religion. The media repeat what the experts say, but are silent about much of the data, how it is collected, and what it means. The public wrongly assumes the conclusions were audited or checked by competing scientists and that journalists asked the scientists hard penetrating questions. It all gains the veneer of rigorous analysis. The public don’t complain when they are asked to pay for it all. An excellent con.
The warmist’s view is more like the hierarchy in the days of the Pope v. Galileo, which, on pain of death by government, was:
The Pope
Papal scientists and theologians
Lay people.
Of course, with the printing press and the subsequent reformation and enlightenment emerged the familiar hierarchy that brought great technological strides for mankind:
Data (empirical evidence)
Scientists
Lay people.
But now the regulating class, the bureaucrats and the mainstream media, have lopped off that vital top layer and inserted their own layer of bought-and-paid-for scientists instead.
This is what we have free speech for. This excellent video says it all.
Ponder as you watch: could you imagine a production like this coming from anywhere else but the Land of The Free? (Think Spain, Sweden or France? Weep, that the land of the Magna Carta was not the obvious source or even a likely contender. Could we really see this video coming out of Berlin or Beijing, or more to the point, Sussex, or Liverpool? The tragedy…)
Yes, this video is so good I’m posting it here even though every other libertarian, freedom loving, and just plain sane blogger will post it too and I hate being repetitive. Yes it’s that good.
For an example of modern government propaganda, wait til you see this: Your Carbon Price (No really, go spend 30 seconds there to try to guess what this production would have cost.)
I’ve never seen a website so slickly designed, so smooth to the point of oozing graphic designer dollars with every rollover. As I watched it, I was seeing our national productivity being buried under Gucci-layers-of-gloss-red-tape. It kept asking me private questions “your name” etc as if the spelling of “Jane”, “Joe” or “John” makes any difference to my carbon footprint (my name is Noneof Yourbusiness). Bring out the sick-bag as Dellers would say.
If regulators tie up the people in enough paper chains they eventually become as strong as steel bindings. “YourCarbonPrice” takes our money to tell us we might “earn” $2 – $5 dollars a week to help the country clean up polluters while we take cold showers, sell the second fridge, and smile with delight at being a “good citizen”. What more could we ask for? A George Orwell fridge magnet?
And watch the sycophantic supporters rush to slap their logo on the propaganda tool.
If I had a Choice mag subscription, I would write to protest today. They support this schmuck with a logo that says “Choice — the people’s watchdog”. Wait for it, now Choice have become expert Climate Analysts. They’ve road-tested exactly one theory offered by the monopolistic sellers, ignored the test results, the competitors, they’ve downplayed the costs, uprated the benefits, and they think this “serves” the public? Their brand name moniker should should read “Choice — the government’s lap-dog”.
Poor Choice mag editors. They still think that government science is uncorrupted.
Watch the propaganda turn the cost of $3000 per worker into 2 cents on a milk bottle
This only hits those nasty polluders …
…and even if they do pass on some of their costs, it is only cents!
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The lowest possible prediction is for a 0.2°C rise per decade.
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