We are just 40 odd comments today from the 100,000th lucky commenter!!! Wait for it, we’ll be sending you on a world tour, a dinner for two, I might just post the Grand Winner both Skeptics Handbook I and II 🙂
Kerry Lutz
And for those who would like some weekend listening I did an interview with Kerry Lutz at the Financial Survival Network. (It’s 15 or 20 minutes). The overlap between skeptics of government science and skeptics of government money grows more obvious. We ranged through climategate to ad hominen arguements, the art of rhetoric, the regulating class, blaming “free markets” for the failures of unfree ones and spanish solar panels among other things. It was 11pm for me, somehow I could (mostly) string the words together.
PS: The comments counter is on the right hand column under “statistics”. (99,982…)
UPDATE: A Winner!
OK. Doing the numbers behind the scenes, it appears (!!!) Bob Malloy hit the big 100k, with Redc being mere seconds behind. So I’ll send books to both of you. Unless I’m wrong, I think Bob pipped redc for the title. (Gee Aye deserves an honorable mention for comment 99,999 and 100,002).
Note that as I write this, the stats are
115,590 Comments
100,023 Approved
0 Pending
15,567 Spam
That spam number are just the ones in the spam queue right now (approx 14 days worth).
But (Egad) we missed the really Big clock-over where the total spam hit *1 million*.
“Akismet has protected your site from 1,103,728 spam comments already.”
So there’s the real victor of blog comments – the bots. 90% of comments are spam. Thank goodness for the Askimet filter. You can see why, when your comments disappear into the filter, they will never be seen again unless you ask our starring wonderful dedicated and wise moderators to fish them out (support AT joannenova.com.au). I stopped checking the spam filter in August 2009.
This propaganda has already set us back two decades, …
… there is a very public record of who has been lying to the public and who hasn’t – and it’s time to start using this information to make the liars and shirkers pay.
Let’s take a page from those Tennessee firemen we heard about a few times last year – the ones who stood idly by as houses burned to the ground because their owners had refused to pay a measly $75 fee.
We can apply this same logic to climate change.
We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices.
They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?
Dear Steve,
I’ve got great news for you, all you have to do to avert a global catastrophe is to find peer reviewed papers that support the models. I’ve been asking for two years, three months and four days, and no one can find one that suggests CO2 will cause much more than 1 degree of warming at most.
On Jan 2nd 2010: I asked “Is there any evidence?“ Do read it, because lots of things you’ve been told are evidence, are not. We want results from instruments (not opinion polls) — things like ice cores, weather balloons, satellites, or lake sludge, heck… it could even be stuff from dead insects, dust, bits of rock, broken beach shells. Whatever. But only the real deal matters. Simulated evidence does not count. No models.
If you find it (and good luck) do rush, send it to Real Climate, the IPCC and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies too. The evidence is overwhelming, but they can’t find that paper either.
Sincerely,
Jo-the-former-Green
PS: If you have some worthless Pacific Islands in grave danger of disappearing, I’d like to buy them.
Which caring environmentalists are trying to save the world through carbon credits? That would be the Banksters. Watch how the banks are working to “fix” the free market, via intervention and regulation, and milk the system to maximize profit. The so called capitalist pigs are really working in the style of the Soviets.
How sick is the EU carbon market? “It’s a dead man walking” according to Johaness Teyssen, chairman of EON.
Carbon permits plunged to a record after European Union data showed emissions from factories and power stations in the region fell more than expected last year amid milder-than-normal weather.
EU carbon for December dropped 11 percent to close at 6.34 euros ($8.45) a ton, the biggest loss since April 28, 2006 on the ICE Futures Europe exchange in London. The previous low was 6.38 euros on Jan. 4. Power-industry emissions dropped to 2009 levels, said Matteo Mazzoni, an analyst for NE Nomisma Energia Srl in Bologna, Italy.
“That is the elephant in the room,” he said today by e- mail. “And then, of course, you have stagnating industrial production.”
But wait. Isn’t “lower industrial output” what the system was supposed to create? Isn’t that the aim — to reduce those evil carbon emissions?
The Verified Emissions Data (CED) released by European authorities showed a 2.4 per cent drop in emissions in 2011, nearly twice the fall expected by analysts. A variety of explanations was given, including unusually warm weather and the economic downturn, but what surprised some analysts was the 3.1 per cent fall in emissions from the power sector when a 1.6 per cent increase had been anticipated, particularly after the closure of nuclear power stations in Germany.
In fact, German emissions fell 1 per cent overall, and emissions from its power sector were down 1.9 per cent. Fossil fuel generation in France slumped 11 per cent. Analysts said because France had completed only 25 per cent of its data, the fall could be greater.
But it was never about the environment, and instead of being pleased, for carbon market players, the price has become too low to make a difference to the environment to make a decent cut, and to help their $200 billion renewable investments thrive.
Some people claim that I mislead people. But it seems they are the misled — not by me, but by their own heroes.
In the Skeptics Handbook I wrote:
“The greenhouse signature is missing
If Greenhouse gases are warming the earth we are supposed to see the first signs of it in the patch of air 10 kilometers above the tropics. But this “hot spot” just isn’t there.
Weather balloons have scanned the global atmosphere but could find no sign of the predicted “hot-spot” warming pattern that greenhouse gases would leave.”
Sources: Sources: (A) Predicted changes 1958-1999. Synthesis and Assessment Report 1.1, 2006, CCSP, Chapter 1, p 25, based on Santer et al. 2000; (B) Same document, recorded change/decade, Hadley Centre weather balloons 1979-1999, p. 116 , fig. 5.7E, from Thorne et al., 2005
With all the benefits of hindsight, it stood up extremely well. (Damn, but I did do a good job 🙂 )
There are claims I should not call it a “signature”, but here’s how it is: The top alarmist researchers called it a fingerprint or a signature, the graph explicitly states that the hot spot is the pattern caused by “well mixed greenhouse gases”, and basically, if you think it’s misleading to talk about fingerprints of greenhouse gases in climate models, then you’ll have to take that up with people like Ben Santer, not me.
1. The top science reports call it a fingerprint or signature
Go to the sources I quote in the Skeptics Handbook (see here). The CCSP Chapter 5, mentions “fingerprint” or variant of that, not just once, but 74 times. If you think that’s being deceptive, then email the authors (that would be Santer, Thorne, Hansen, Wigley et al…see below). The IPCC also mentions “signature” in the text leading up to the hot spot page, Assessment Report 4.
Let’s quote the IPCC (Chapter Nine, page 674) right in front of a version of the predicted hot spot graph (see below).
These figures indicate that the modeled vertical and zonal average signature of the temperature response should depend on the forcings. The major features shown in Figure 9.1 are robust to using different climate models.
The IPCC certainly wants you to know the signature is “distinct”:
The simulated responses to natural forcing are distinct from those due to the anthropogenic forcings described above.
2. Look at the original graph.
Compare the pictures, read the caption. The experts tell us that the models predict different causes will give different patterns. The hot spot graph is listed as “simulations of the vertical profile change due to” … wait for it… “Well mixed Greenhouse gases“. The other likely causes are predicted to make different patterns.
What kind of organization receives all its funding from one source, then claims to be “independent?” (Yes, spot another GONGO idea).
The Conversation trumpets that it is “Independent” but it’s funded with $6 million from … the Government. As Tim Blair said “it’s a baby ABC“. (A Government organized “non government” organisation).
The Conversation gets 20,000 readers a day (apparently). According to the Alexa Stats, I single-handedly get about half the global traffic they do. They have an entire nation of university staff to help write stories. I’ve had ten guest authors and have written over 700 posts myself.
(If what they do costs $6 million, does that mean my site is worth $3m? Am I grossly underpaid, or are they grossly overpaid?)
This is another example of the self-growing-cycle of big-government. The site is dominated with stories that favor statist-big-government policies. They break laws of logic and reason, claim that experts are writing, but we non-experts working from home can point out the errors of those with professorships in our spare time, and with no PhD.
Consider the wit and wisdom of one Stefan Lewandowsky — who writes as a Professorial Fellow of a misnamed topic called “cognitive science”. If ever you needed evidence that the science of psychology was not the same as the science of physics, look no further. Lewandowsky is case study number one in reasons to eject the School of Psychology back to the Faculty of the Arts.*
When another scientist impersonated someone else, stole documents, possibly created a fake document, and published it all online, Lewandowsky argues this is morally all OK and it passes The Conversation’s editorial bar. He compares the lies to allied efforts to conceal the D-Day landing in World War II. So the morals of science and war are equivalent? Perhaps Lewandowsky has not noticed the two fields have slightly different aims?
Science is solely for the pursuit of truth, so he who uses lies (or specious ad homs) cheats himself and all those who fund or follow him. Deceit may win a war, but it won’t help humanity master the atmosphere.
Lewandowsky also thinks that anyone who disagrees with the government is mad, just like in the old Soviet Union. It all fits.
Presumably he lectures with these same ethical standards too — thus leaving a trail of students who think that if their research is for “the greater good” (and whose isn’t?) then it’s OK to steal or fake results? Is that the aim of The University of Western Australia — to fake their way to higher knowledge? Is cheating on exams any different? Would you hire one of Lewandowsky’s students?
What is science when cognitive scientists talk of “climate denial machines”? Dear Stephan, can you define that term scientifically, or even in plain English? Which “climate” is this machine denying? Can you name a single person who denies we have a climate, or that is it changing? Have you any empirical evidence to back up that claim, or it is just the dribbling speculations of a delusional cult-fan who gets promotions and status, not through reason or evidence, but by being the most active sycophant of a grant-winning theory?
Lewandowsky’s writing on The Conversation is not just ethically infantile (war = science), it’s sloppy and unresearched too. He claims that “According to the Heartland Institute, “junk science” is the research that has linked tobacco to lung cancer”, not realizing that Heartland have never claimed that tobacco doesn’t cause cancer. Perhaps Heartland’s position of assessing studies, different diseases, ages of death and odds ratios is a bit too old fashioned for Stefan? He demonizes them by oversimplifying what they do to the point where he speaks untruths. Heartland are mostly concerned about getting evidence on the issue of second hand smoke, and on the equity of cigarette taxes that go far beyond recouping costs of healthcare for smoking related illness. Their approach is far more scientific than Lewandowsky’s, which involves making inaccurate sweeping statements on topics he knows little about. It is indeed unresearched activist statements like his that are the “junk science” noble groups like Heartland oppose, and Heartland do it to serve the public, with volunteered funding. On the other hand, Lewandowsky uses funding extracted from the public by threat of force to offer us illogical, poorly studied, unreferenced and confused arguments in order to justify squandering more funds taken from the public. Wonderfully moral of you Stephan. Quite the parasite on the public purse.
Clouds cover an enormous 65% of the planet and are responsible for about half of the sunlight that is reflected back out to space.[i] The effects of clouds are so strong that most of the differences between IPCC-favoured-models comes from the assumptions the models make about clouds. Cloud feedbacks are the “largest source of uncertainty”.[ii] Numerous studies show models project wildly different results for clouds, and yet few could correctly simulate clouds as recorded by satellites.[iii] One researcher described our understanding of cloud parameters as being “still in a fairly primitive state.” [iv]
Sunlight that travels 150 million kilometers can be blocked a mere 1km away from the Earth’s surface and reflected back to space. The situation is complicated though, because clouds also slow the outgoing radiation — which has a warming effect. In general lower clouds are thicker and have a large cooling effect, while higher clouds are thinner and tend to trap more heat than they reflect (i.e. net warming). Observations show the cooling effect of clouds dominates the warming effect. (Allen 2011[v]) which means that, in general, more clouds means more cooling.
Clouds provide negative feedback
When cloud changes have been measured, measurements show that, in the short term, as the world warms cloud cover tends to increase.[vi] ,[vii] Satellites monitor the radiation leaving the top of the atmosphere. During 15 strong swings in temperature, Spencer et al 2007[viii] showed the high ice clouds decreased, allowing more radiation to escape to space. Spencer found a strong negative feedback and concluded that the net effect of clouds is to cool the ocean-atmosphere system during its tropospheric warm phase, and warm it during its cool phase. That is, clouds moderate or dampen temperature movement in either direction. Tropical clouds buffer the world somewhat from sharp temperature shifts.
…
Other researchers have found positive feedback when analyzing clouds, but usually focused on a small region of the globe, not on the whole tropical band where the most important effects take place. If clouds provide negative feedback, they will moderate any man-made climate changes.
How could clouds not cause climate change?
It seems hard to believe but the IPCC (and Andrew Dessler in particular) assume clouds respond to climate change, but can’t cause climate change. In other words, they assume there are no other factors which could change cloud cover (and which would therefore force the global temperature up or down). It is well known that assumptions are the mother of all foul-ups, and this one reeks.
Clouds might not just be a negative feedback instead of a positive one, they might be a forcing factor themselves, making all the estimates of climate sensitivity incorrect.
The IPCC models assume that clouds change in response to temperature, so they are a “feedback”.[ix] In other words, they categorically rule out any possibility that some other factor might change cloud cover, which would in turn, warm or cool the Earth. (Why? Just a convenient assumption.) But if ocean currents or wind patterns changed, that would affect evaporation and cloud formation. If cloud seeding nuclei rose or fell, that too would affect the number of clouds and potentially change our weather.
There is plenty of evidence that other factors affect clouds, and thus could be driving global temperatures, not CO2. For example, cloud seeding particles are formed by cosmic rays[x] which in turn are affected by the solar magnetic field[xi] [xii]. This would explain why river flows correlate with sunspot activity.[xiii] ,[xiv] Sunspots occur when the solar magnetic field is active. Fluxes in the heat content of the ocean, and sea levels also correlate with the solar cycle.[xv] Even 200 years ago, the connection between the sun and wheat prices was notable.[xvi]
Spencer & Braswell use the most simple of models to show that unaccounted forcing factors would make it impossible for the global climate models to estimate feedbacks, and calculate climate sensitivity. [xvii] [xviii] [xix] They demonstrate that clouds can be a forcing factor as well, and that the IPCC climate models significantly overestimate warming.
Spencer & Braswell demonstrate that it’s very difficult to find definitive feedback signals in a dynamic system that is never at equilibrium. The only feedback they can calculate in their 2008 and 2010 papers is negative and means a climate sensitivity of about 0.6°C for a doubling of CO2, though it’s only applicable over short time-frames. They demonstrate the near impossibility of establishing climate sensitivity over long time frames. But if climate sensitivity to CO2 is as low as they find, and dwarfed by potential cloud forcing, it would mean no postponed effect from CO2. We have had all the effect there is and there will be no stored heat lying dormant to cause future climate change. This would explain Trenberth’s concern, expressed in the CRU e-mails, that the pro-global warming scientists “can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”.
Spencer & Braswell’s 2011 paper confirms the difficulty in sorting out what is feedback and what is forcing, finding that it is not possible with current methods to separate the two. Neither the most nor the least sensitive models could predict the changes in energy before or after changes in temperature.
[i^] IPCC, Assessment Report 4, 2007, Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 8. [PDF] Page 610 8.3.1.1.2 “The balance of radiation at the top of the atmosphere”
[ii] IPCC, Assessment Report 4, 2007, Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 8. [PDF] Page 636 8.6.3.2 “Clouds”
[iii] Zhang, M.H., Lin, W.Y., Klein, S.A., Bacmeister, J.T., Bony, S., Cederwall, R.T., Del Genio, A.D., Hack, J.J., Loeb, N.G., Lohmann, U., Minnis, P., Musat, I., Pincus, R., Stier, P., Suarez, M.J., Webb, M.J., Wu, J.B., Xie, S.C., Yao, M.-S. and Yang, J.H. 2005. Comparing clouds and their seasonal variations in 10 atmospheric general circulation models with satellite measurements. Journal of Geophysical Research 110: D15S02,
[iv] Randall, D., Khairoutdinov, M., Arakawa, A. and Grabowski, W. 2003. Breaking the cloud parameterization deadlock. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 84: 1547-1564.
[v] Allan, R [2011] Combining satellite data and models to estimate cloud radiative effects at the surface and in the atmosphere. University of Reading [Abstract] [Discussion]
[vi] Croke, M.S., Cess, R.D. and Hameed, S. 1999. Regional cloud cover change associated with global climate change: Case studies for three regions of the United States. Journal of Climate 12: 2128-2134
[vii] Herman, J.R., Larko, D., Celarier, E. and Ziemke, J. 2001. Changes in the Earth’s UV reflectivity from the surface, clouds, and aerosols. Journal of Geophysical Research 106: 5353-5368
[viii] Spencer, R.W., Braswell, W.D., Christy, J.R., Hnilo, J. (2007). Cloud and radiation budget changes associated with tropical intraseasonal oscillations. Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L15707, doi:10.1029/2007/GL029698. [PDF]
[ix] IPCC, Assessment Report 4, 2007, Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 8. (see 8.6.3.2) [PDF]
[x] Kirkby, J. et al. (2011) Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation, Nature 476, 429-433 (2011). | Article
[xi] Svensmark, H. 1998. Influence of cosmic rays on earth’s climate. Physical Review Letters 81: 5027-5030. [Discussion CO2Science]
[xii] Svensmark, H. and Friis-Christensen, E.: Variation of cosmic ray flux and global cloud coverage – a missing link in solar-climate relationships, J. Atmos. Sol. Terr. Phys., 59, 1225–1232, 1997.
[xiii] Mauas, P., Flamenco, E., Buccino, A. (2008) “Solar Forcing of the Stream Flow of a Continental Scale South American River”, Instituto de Astronomı´a y Fı´sica del Espacio, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Physical Review Letters 101 [http://www.iafe.uba.ar/httpdocs/reprint_parana.pdf])
[xiv] Alexander, W., Bailey, F., Bredenkamp, B., van der Merwe, A., and Willemse, N. (2007) Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering, Vol. 49 No 2 [PDF]
[xv] Shaviv, N.J. (2008) Using the oceans as a calorimeter to quantify the solar radiative forcing. Journal of Geophysical Research 113: 10.1029/2007JA012989. [CO2 Science discussion]
[xvi] Herschel, W. 1801, in Philosphical Transactions of the Royal Society, London, 265 and 354. (See here, and here)
[xvii] Spencer, R., and W.D. Braswell. (2008). Potential biases in feedback diagnosis from observations data: a simple model demonstration. Journal of Climate, 21, 5624-5628.
[xviii] Spencer, R.W., and W.D. Braswell, (2010), On the diagnosis of radiative feedback in the presence of unknown radiative forcing, J. Geophys. Res, 115, D16109
[xix] Spencer, R. W.; Braswell, W.D. (2011) On the Misdiagnosis of Climate Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance, Remote Sens. 2011, 3, 1603-1613. [PDF]
The IPCC say feedbacks amplify CO2’s warming by a factor of about three.
Without the amplification from positive feedback there is no crisis
So being nice people, let’s assume it’s warmed since 1979 and assume that it was all due to carbon dioxide. If so, that means feedbacks are …. zero. There goes that prediction of 3.3ºC.
Feedbacks are the name of the game. If carbon dioxide doesn’t trigger off powerful positive feedbacks, there was and is no crisis. Even James Hansen would agree — inasmuch as he himself said that CO2 would directly cause about 1.2ºC of warming if it doubled, without any feedbacks (Hansen 1984).
Consider the warming from1979 to 2007, when we measured temperatures using satellites and not corrupted and adjusted land thermometers. Douglass and Christy (2008) point out that, given how much CO2 levels increased in that time, the warming only amounts to what the IPCC scientists predict we should get from CO2 alone, from the direct effect of CO2, and not from the effect of CO2 plus positive feedbacks.
The warming trend expected from CO2 without any feedbacks at all is 0.07 ºC/decade. The trends from the UAH satellites are 0.06±0.01ºC/decade. Since the two figures are almost the same, no one needs a super-computer to tell them that this implies that the sum of all feedbacks (and the sum of all fears) is zip, nada, nothing.
Furthermore, this study likely overestimates the effect of CO2. There is clearly a 60 year cycle of warming and cooling due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and the 28 year study period was the steepest part of that 60 year cycle. Hence, trends over longer periods are likely to be smaller, which implies that feedbacks are negative.
Thus the upper bound on climate sensitivity (the temperature rise when CO2 doubles) from the last three decades of warming is about 1°C, and that’s assuming all the warming is due to CO2 increases and not due to other factors like solar magnetic effects, cosmic radiation, ocean current oscillations, or geomagnetic forces. Which is much less than the IPCC median estimate of 3.3°C.
(I’m revisiting older important papers and setting up resource pages, largely thanks to Tony Cox’s prodding. In this post I found it interesting that Lindzen’s work, which was so controversial because it proved the IPCC is wrong, was in many ways merely confirming earlier results. — Jo)
Guest Post: Tony Cox and Jo Nova
Satellite measurements agree with the ocean heat content measurements. As the Earth warms, more radiation escapes to space.
If feedbacks are positive (as the IPCC estimates), then as the Earth warms the amount of energy being radiated to space will shrink (thus warming the Earth even further). If feedbacks are negative, as the Earth warms more energy will radiate away.
Multiple studies show that feedbacks are negative.
Lindzen and Choi analyzed short periods of warming looking for changes in the outgoing long-wave radiation leaving from the top of the atmosphere. The satellite observations show, repeatedly, that as the Earth warms, the climate system shifts and lets more of the infra red or long-wave energy out to space.[1],[2] It’s like a safety release valve. This means that the system has negative feedbacks (like almost all known long-lived or stable natural systems). The changes dampen the effects of extra CO2.
The Planet Under Pressure conference has brought out the clawing powermongers. The Commentator.com team who were brave enough to attend, tell us that no one got very excited about the science, but the word “regulation” was received, well… ecstatically.
The conference was largely focused on how scientists and activists can coalesce to deconstruct the Western way of living and moving to something entirely different, where economic growth and wealth creation is abandoned and replaced, instead, with sustainability targets, trade barriers, regulation and taxation. Indeed there were numerous occasions during the main sessions whereby even the mention of the word ‘regulation’ was met with rapturous applause.
See? The “regulating class” name fits them to a tee.
They have given up on reasoned debate and instead are fomenting a revolution.
According to Lord Anthony Giddens – a preeminent sociologist and speaker at the conference – it means that now is the time for an “activist civil society” to move away from the Western way of life which has proved “too destructive” and toward a radical utopia (read, communes) – all part of what he terms a renewed assault on global warming sceptics.
We can laugh at them, but as Marc Morano points out, they speak from the seat of power (and on taxpayer funds). More of the taxpayers are strongly skeptical than strongly pro-“climate”-action, yet they shamelessly use those funds to promote their own agenda.
And we always knew that “Sustainability” was not a field of science. This prof demonstrates why:
We heard from Sander Van Der Leeuw – Dean and Professor at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University – that now is the time for scientists to forget objectivity and become citizens once again; for scientists to “better understand decision-making” at the highest level.
How blatant! A call to put politics ahead of science…we’ve been complaining for years that some of the government climate scientists have been doing that, now this professor doesn’t even bother to pretend any more.
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ADMIN NOTE: For site maintenance (in an effort to rearrange things to reduce costs) the site may be down over Easter for 24 hours. Don’t panic! Apologies for the inconvenience. — Jo
The brilliant James Delingpole is coming to Australia thanks to the IPA to promote freedom for the world, to rescue modern science and to sell a hundred thousand copies of his new book: Killing the Earth to Save It (How Environmentalists are ruining the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your jobs). He is visiting Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. If you don’t know who James Delingpole is, all I can say is Where Have You Been?
Delingpole is devastating. His disarming honesty, outrageous anecdotes and wide ranging research makes for an ripping read that combines politics, science, money in ways only Delingpole can. His quips paralyze the most excessively pious and drown pomposity with cold common sense.
He has a knack for getting to the heart of the matter, and usually with a poleaxe. I’d heard a lot about Agenda 21, but I didn’t know why it mattered or where it came from until I read Killing the Earth…”
James Delingpole – one of the worlds most popular, most irreverent libertarian commentators. His twitter bio says: I’m right about everything. He pulls no punches, and tells it like it is.
Guaranteed to be eye-opening, though provoking, and entertaining.
In Perth, numbers are limited, so please RSVP with names to make sure you don’t miss out. Thanks to Council for the National Interest (CNI WA) for helping with the Perth event. We’ll be asking for donations to cover the costs on the night.
Soon, the moment will come when the crowd will say “I always knew it was fake”.
Here are three signs we are at the beginning of The End.
1. Op-Ed writers will be pointing out how governments are unwinding policies: Dominic Lawson: Britain Has Finally Rejected The Bogus Economics Of Climate Change. Germany (home of half the worlds solar energy production) is winding up its pursuit of renewables, and eight Eastern European nations said “No Thanks” (legally) to the EU’s authoritarian dictat on carbon emissions, and hardly anyone complained…
And which energy source is ecologically correct Germany now developing faster than any other? Lignite, otherwise known as brown coal, the most carbon- intensive fuel known to modern man.
This makes the countries on the European Union’s eastern borders (notably Poland, for which indigenous coal is a dominant energy source) even more reluctant to accept the national emissions targets promoted by Brussels. Eight of these nations launched a legal challenge and last week they won a ruling by the European Court of Justice that Brussels had exceeded its powers in imposing such limits. The court brushed aside the European commission’s complaint that it would not otherwise be able to “protect the integrity of the EU-wide market of [carbon] allowances”.
The most telling point is that this verdict gained almost no coverage. As Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, observes: “In the past, Poland’s intractable hostility to green unilateralism was greeted by protestation in capitals around Europe. Today it is hardly noticed by the media, while green campaigners have become limp . . . Other and more pressing concerns are taking precedence and are completely overriding the green agenda.”
3. And writers will tell us how skeptics are winning:
For years S. Fred Singer was one of a few voices to challenge the claims of impending doom from alleged manmade global warming.
TEXT BY MARK LANDSBAUM
We visited with him during his recent visit to Chapman University. It was a happy occasion. After years of criticizing the allegedly “settled science,” Singer’s side of the debate is enjoying new and widespread credibility. This is thanks to many convergent developments.
First, there’s that inconvenient problem for warmists that the scant atmospheric heating they pointed to as evidence of looming doom pretty much stopped about 15 years ago. It’s awkward to keep screaming that the sky is falling when everyone can see it isn’t.
Then there are the discoveries of how alleged climate experts for years bullied dissenters, plotted to keep opposing views out of peer-reviewed publications and doctored data to conveniently arrive at the necessary conclusions to keep “the cause” alive. “The cause” is how insiders referred to what they wanted you to believe is impartial science. But it always has been a cause, almost religiously so. We know these things now thanks to two massive leaks of emails revealing accounts of the insiders’ candid hand-wringing and scheming.
Also in recent years has been an awakening among respectable scientists, heretofore content to go along with the supposed “consensus” about manmade global warming’s threat. One of them, David M.W. Evans, formerly of the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change), became skeptical when he discovered the main global warming argument collapsing from 1998-2006.
Scoff scoff scoff. There is no global conspiracy to get One World Government. If there was, the leaders would have sent a memo to Bob Brown to be quiet, to Scientific American to rephrase the agenda, and to Richard Black to stay out of group photos at socialist events. So there is no central command, no invisible patriarch who pulls all the strings. But clearly there is a whole class of people who “know” what you need better than you do, and they know you need more governing. The regulating class. Shhhh.
First, the red shade of Black
Blacks Whitewash* has caught Richard Black (paid by the British taxpayer to be an impartial science reporter) taking an active part in a meeting of people who want to influence government policies. Quoting BlacksWhitewash:
“So the Outreach Group advises UNEP and it looks at how unelected NGO’s can better use the information within the GEO reports to pressure Governments. In the Network 2015 document there is a photo of the Outreach Group at the San Sebastian meeting:
There, behind a Felix Dodds and an Esther Larranaga, is Richard Black, BBC journalist, a publicly funded broadcaster with a duty to remain impartial, in the middle of an advisory process that seeks to influence Government decisions. There with the full knowledge and agreement of the BBC.”
Imagine we had BBC reporters sitting in on, say, Heartland Institute meetings (with hypothetically — coal-industry-activists in the room too). How the MSM journalists would howl, if they caught him “being one of the team”, explaining how to get messages out, and how to push an agenda. (And bear in mind it is not a true equivalence, comparing NGO-green-activists with Heartland. The latter use private money (not government grants) and promote policies that reduce taxes and the burden on individuals, where as the UNEP and co always want the opposite, and do it with taxpayer help as well. Which group poses a greater threat to the public? Which group needs great scrutiny?)
Black is supposed to serve the taxpayer, yet he is using the position and support the taxpayer has given him to assist groups who are pushing a controversial proposal for highly expensive, onerous policies that will give these groups and their “friends” more power, and more money, all at the expense of the people Black is supposed to represent.
The BBC Charter states that it is supposed to “…do all it can to ensure that controversial subjects are treated with due accuracy and impartiality…”. How could Black point out flaws in their arguments when he spends so much time helping them craft their message and so little time with the people who point out the flaws?
Blacks Whitewash points out this is a long ongoing pattern, and that Black has been involved since 2007 in repeat meetings, and that he does not just attend but delivers presentations like this: “Media – Lessons from the WSSD and the Obama Campaign – Richard Black, BBC Environment Correspondent”. Read it all, it’s an excellent post. [Waybackmachine archive of BlacksWhitewash page here].
Here’s a forgotten paper that deserves more attention: Idso 1998.
Rather than using an enormously complex global circulation model (or 22) to come up with a figure for climate sensitivity, Sherwood Idso does calculations from eight completely different natural experiments which all arrive at similar figures. In short, he reviewed 20 years of work to arrive at a prediction that if CO2 is doubled we will get 0.4°C of warming at most, and even he admitted, it might be an overestimate. Basically by the time CO2 levels double, he says we ought expect 0 – 0.4°C of warming, after feedbacks are taken into account. Idso started off assuming that the feedbacks were largely positive, but repeatedly found that they were negative.
Idso’s approach was novel. Instead of climate sensitivity to CO2, he estimates the sensitivity of the Earth to any factor. He calls it the “surface air temperature sensitivity factor“. Once something known heats or cools the Earth, how much do the net feedbacks amplify or dampen that initial change? Rather than trying to measure and capture every single feedback and process, and then calculate the end results, Idso finds situations where he can isolate a factor and calculate the effect after all the known and unknown feedbacks have occurred.
There are eight natural experiments Idso looked at. Even he was skeptical initially, knowing his initial experiments were based on one city and shorter time frames, but the independent experiments turned up such similar numbers that he grew confident that the results were meaningful.
Natural Experiment 1: Humidity over Phoenix affects minimum temperatures
He looked at humidity and temperatures on cloudless days over Phoenix Arizona. He followed 30 years of records looking for how water vapor may have influenced the maximum and minimum temperatures at the same time of year. He found that the amount of water vapor didn’t affect maxima, but did affect the minima which occur just before dawn — when the effect of the humidity trapping the outgoing heat radiating off the planet was not confounded by incoming solar radiation.
Natural Experiment 2: Dust over Phoenix keeps the city warmer in winter
Idso estimated the sensitivity by calculating the extra warming effect of the dust in the winter months and the changes in radiative flux from the changes in vertical distribution of dust between the seasons.
Natural Experiment 3: Changes in incoming solar radiation and temperature at 81 US sites
There were two common trends, a lower one for the West Coast which he speculated was driven by the Pacific, and a higher one for the interior which matched the trends at Phoenix. This was the beginning of a pattern that consistently shows that different regions have slightly different sensitivities — all negative.
Natural Experiment 4: The natural greenhouse effect
The natural greenhouse effect is accepted as being 33°C due to 348Wm-2 of greenhouse warming. That’s 0.1°C /(W m-2). (The IPCC expects that doubling CO2 will increase radiation by 3.7 W m-2 before feedbacks,, suggesting a temperature increase around 0.4°C.)
Natural Experiment 5: The Pole to Equator Gradient
Idso divided up the globe into small bands across the latitudes, used the distribution of cloud cover , mean air temperatures, water vapor pressures and the solar radiation absorbed at the surface to calculate estimates of sensitivity for each band. The results fell into two major trend groups. Basically most of the globe recorded similar estimates to the one in Experiment 4 [0.1°C /(W m-2)], but the poles were twice as sensitive [0.2°C /(W m-2)]. This is what we’d expect. (The tropics are less sensitive to temperature change because evaporation rises dramatically at around 30°C which slows further heat gain. The poles are the most sensitive because there is little evaporation, and albedo changes from highly reflective ice to highly absorbent ocean can exacerbate temperature changes.)
It comes as not even a tiny surprize that when someone asks “Where does all the CO2 go in an ice age?” that the answer is “The Ocean“.
We already know temperatures rise 800 years before CO2 levels (Caillon 2003), and we know the oceans contain 50 times as much CO2 as the sky. Moreover, basic chemistry tells us that CO2 (like all gases) will dissolve better in cold water, and be released as the water warms. To cap it all off, the deep abyss of the oceans turns over once every millenia or so (which fits loosely with the “lag” between temperature and CO2 levels).
But you would think this new research was solving a deep mystery, rather than confirming what most sane knowledgeable people would expect. Nonetheless, this may be the first detailed study of C13 levels going back 24,000 years.
Why did the atmosphere contain so little carbon dioxide (CO2) during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago? Why did it rise when the Earth’s climate became warmer? Processes in the ocean are responsible for this, says a new study based on newly developed isotope measurements. This study has now been published in the scientific journal “Science” by scientists from the Universities of Bern and Grenoble and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association.
What does it take to be a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science? Apparently, making wildly exaggerated predictions that are already known to be wrong, calling people names, and having a thin grip on the scientific method is just the stuff the Academy is looking for. Who knew? Science used to be about seeking the truth.
Tim Flannery
The Australian Academy of Science thinks that it can give the besieged Tim Flannery more credibility. Instead, they pour their own credibility down the sink. If making predictions that are wrong and exaggerated, and following fashions of scientific groupthink is “good science”, who next will make the hallowed list of “Fellows” — Cate Blanchett? Clive Hamilton? Charles Manson?
Hailing people who achieve in Science Communication might be fine, but it is not communicating science when their predictions don’t fit the real world and they won’t change the theory. The prophesies of Tim are a religion. (See “Help! How you can tell a scientist from a non-scientist”.)
Now every time Flannery makes a statement like these below, it can carry the AAS logo:
For the first time, this global super-organism, this global intelligence will be able to send a signal, a strong and clear signal to the earth. And what that means in a sense is that we can, we will be a regulating intelligence for the planet, I’m sure, in the future … And lead to a stronger Gaia, if you will, a stronger earth system”. ABC The Drum (No record available?)
‘This planet, this Gaia, will have acquired a brain and a nervous system. That will make it act as a living animal, as a living organism, at some sort of level.’
‘Picture an eight-storey building by a beach, then imagine waves lapping its roof,‘ The Age, 2006
‘It’s hardly surprising that beaches are going to disappear with climate change, National Climate Change Forum, (see here)
‘Perth will be the 21st century’s first ghost metropolis.‘ 2004
“The water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009.” March 2008
Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane would ‘need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months.’ June 2007
In science, ”a theory is only valid for as long as it has not been disproved“… (The Weather Makers, 2005, p2)
Vincent Gray dryly replied: If I state that Flannery will go to a special monkey heaven when he dies, who could ever disprove that?
How many favors has Flannery done science communication? The reputation of science?
Flannery says we need “a clear and level-headed discussion“, but he calls those who disagree with him “deniers“, and likens Nobel Physics Prize winners to “flat earthers“ who say “the climate isn’t changing“, even though no serious skeptical scientist has ever said such a thing. It’s sloppy thinking based on sloppy research and wrapped in hypocrisy and ideology. Flannery is not a man who is even trying to have a scientific conversation. Is this the AAS “spokesman” for science?
How did it come to this? The downfall of another once-great institution
The Academy needs to move with the times. It’s been caught here, another unwitting victim of the government monopsony that distorts the scientific market free of ideas. While our government (and many others) have poured billions into research to find a crisis due to CO2, none of them have paid anything to find the opposite. The scientists of the Academy have been caught napping. There are around 450 Fellows, and 20 of the 21 new appointments are rigorously done, but it only took 6 in the Special Election Committee to recommend “Tim-Flannery”. The only vote is an email one, and there is no proviso for discussion or dissent before the vote. (There used to be when votes were taken at the AGM.)
Hello Earthians! It’s time to say thank you to Edison, to Faraday and Maxwell, it’s time to celebrate the Gift of Light.
Saturday night at 8.30 – 9.30pm this week is the Hour of Power
(Don’t confuse this with the splinter group celebrations called Earth Hour, where people sit in the dark — so they can appreciate the glory of luminosity come 9.31).
The Glory! We are the lucky generation with light at the flick of a switch
The CEI gets the thumbs up too. They are running Human Achievement Hour. (Click the image for more info).
In the hundred thousand years since homo sapiens came to be, people have fled bondage, wars, small-pox, dysentery, died from minor scratches, starved to death, been ravaged by lions, stricken by cholera, and survived the odd ninety thousand year stretches of hypothermic, abysmal ice age. We lived in the darkness for 99,900 years, cowering in corners, listening to drips, waiting for the sun.
There is only one type of Freedom – and all else is servitude, slavery or tyranny.
It’s your chance to show your commitment to fighting the forces of darkness. Be brave, stand up to the people who want to tell you what kind of globe you are allowed to buy. Feed the world by helping to boost global CO2 to lift crop yields and fertilize farms all over the planet. Children are hungry in Haiti and, since CO2 is a well mixed gas, sooner or later, you will be helping them.
Things you can do at 8.30 on Saturday:
Write down the tally on the electricity meter.
Turn on all the lights you can find (bonus points for incandescents from the stash.)
Put on the party lights, the patio light, the pool light, the mozzie zappers, unpack those Christmas decorations. Get out your torches. Switch the movement detector spotlights to continuous operation. (Involve the kids — they love to help).
Light your backyard with the landcruiser headlights! (Don’t flatten the battery, make sure you keep that engine running.)
Don’t forget those bar radiators — revel in that infra red! (Light the kitchen with the ones in the oven and grill.)
Drink German Beer and or French Champagne. Drink toasts to coal miners, oil rig workers, and power station staff.
Take a photo, take lots of photos, and send them to myself, and Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt.
At 9.30pm read that meter and tell us how many KWhr you’ve liberated. Who will win The Hour of Power?
Some of those fossil fuels have been waiting for 100 million years to return to the sky.
The cheapest most cost-effective way to liberate those fuels is to buy Hard Coking Coal which is as cheap as $1/ton on Alibaba (enough for every power hour for the rest of your life, and there’ll be some left for the kids too: the minimum order is 30,000 t. Send your bulk carrier.)
We shouldn’t underestimate shift that has just taken place. The psychology of Australian politics moved as the large swinging center was revealed. Not only was the Queensland election worse for Labor than anyone predicted, the message was clear, voters rejected the lies, and rejected the carbon tax. The smear campaign by the Labor leader (Bligh) did more harm to her than it did to her target. Finally, the Hype-&-Spin Machine ran off the rails.
This is real progress. Today both Queensland and Victoria are peeling back the warmist bureaucracy. I’m happy.
The new premier of Queensland Campbell Newman, is scrapping many state carbon reduction schemes. Who knew that the head of Queensland’s Office of Climate Change was none other than Mr Withers, husband of former Premier Anna Bligh? Who said the Labor Party nowadays is just about government money for supporters and mates?
Campbell Newman has said he won’t sack Withers. Instead he wants him to unwind all the programs he put in place. Newman is keeping the solar subsidies for household rooftops, but everything else is being dumped.
The showpiece of the Gillard government’s $1.5 billion Solar Flagships Program is now in jeopardy, after Mr Newman yesterday pulled the plug on $75 million in state funding pledged for the $1.2bn Solar Dawn solar thermal project near Chinchilla, west of Brisbane. Mr Newman yesterday declared his LNP government would axe seven other green schemes, on the grounds the carbon tax would make them redundant.
This was posted in Sept 2011. I don’t know why I didn’t see it til this week (h/t Jennifer Marohasy’s).
“They want to regulate every aspect of your life, and they are prepared to lie to do it…”
Great job here from 1984Report. (Do please contact me “1984” 🙂 )
On this Monckton tour Carlisle spent hours listening to David Evans and myself talk about errors in climate models, with peer reviewed evidence that the models are wrong, yet she didn’t think it was worth mentioning that to the people of Australia whose government was proposing new taxes based on those models. She interviewed me for an hour and asked for references, and presumably she couldn’t find holes in them, because she didn’t mention them either. She wanted to know where I got my money from. When I explained how pure and untainted my funding was, that I essentially hardly have any, she forgot to mention that too. Character assassination, anyone or is it just a form of ABC Alzheimers?
A gold bar that should have weighed 1,000 grams, weighed 2 grams too little. The owner had it cut in half to reveal that the certified, stamped bar with serial numbers had tungsten rods inserted all the way through it. Tungsten, has a density of 19.35 g/cm3, so is a near-perfect match for gold (19.32 g/cm3) and it sells for just one ten thousandth of the price.
The gold bar was cut in half to reveal the tungsten rods.
The problem of fake gold bars
By Felix Salmon
March 25, 2012
You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to find this worrying: a 1kg gold bar, certified as 99.98% pure by XRF (X-ray fluorescence) tests, turns out to have been drilled out and largely replaced with tungsten. This bar was discovered only because it was 2 grams lighter than it ought to have been: the forgers failed to add quite enough gold to the outside of the bar to make up for the weight lost when they replaced gold with tungsten. But if they’d gotten the weight right, it would probably still be circulating today.
Is this a big issue? Who knows? Gold bars are rarely audited. Indeed even the most respectable bars in the world, the ones the People of the USA own at Fort Knox, haven’t been so much as independently counted, let alone properly audited or even checked for purity. That’s $300 billion dollars of assets no one appears to have audited since 1953. Remember gold is a relic from a bygone era. It is so irrelevant, that at Fort Knox, no one is even allowed to photograph it.
A gold bar of one kilo is worth about $50,000. Tungsten sells for roughly $400 per ton, or $50/kg for ferrotungsten. (No, those numbers don’t match, tungsten is either cheap or very cheap.) In any case, if a crook can replace half a 1kg gold bar with tungsten, they stand to make $20,000. If they do that with a 400 oz bar, “profit” comes in at around a third of a million dollars. For that kind of money I imagine quite a few people might think it was worth learning how to use a gold drill.
Hey, but this is alright when you are spending someone else’s money isn’t it?
Staff at the Australian Department of Climate Change are so depressed, I can’t think why, that the government is spending $175,000 to cheer them up.
Could it be that the poor staff would enjoy their jobs more if they weren’t doing something which was a complete waste of time, and their programs weren’t a vacuous drain? Remember if we all abandon Australia, AND if the IPCC aren’t wildly overestimating the effects of extra CO2, then, and only then, will Australia cool the world by as much as — rounded to the nearest whole number — zero degrees. (Pace Matt Ridley)
Things are so bad, people were ashamed to admit to people that they worked at the Dept of Climate Change. Worse, this study was done back in 2010 – before a round of endless-drought-breaking floods in 2011 and then another round of endless-drought-breaking floods in 2012. This was before the worst of the plummeting Labor polling, before FakeGate… just how low do these people feel now?
175k to cheer up Department of Energy and Climate Change staff
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(Gee Aye deserves an honorable mention for comment 99,999 and 100,002).
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