The good news is that a majority of people are aware of media bias, and are skeptical of what the media tells them. The bad news is that this is just another marker showing the average Western citizen is losing faith in the integrity of so many key institutions.
The activist journo’s have overplayed their hand. They are not even trying…
[July 21st, 2016] A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that only 20% of Likely U.S. Voters think that when covering a political campaign, most reporters try to offer unbiased coverage. Most (69%) say reporters try to help the candidate they want to win. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure (To see survey question wording, click here.)
The media have lost so much influence. They described Brexiteers as loony, selfish and xenophobic, but more than half the country ignored them and voted for Brexit. Similarly, the US media mocked and denigrated Trump supporters, and continually predicted he wouldn’t stay in the race, and wouldn’t make it through the primaries, and yet he did. Poor pundits keep being surprised by the people.
The key word in this survey is “try” — everyone knows humans have some kind of bias, but the survey asked “do most reporters try to offer unbiased coverage or do they try to help the candidate they want to win?”
Mainstream news has become an advertising forum for big government, but the dumb voters can see through it.
Nearly 50% of US voters think the media is biased against Trump. Nearly 20% say it’s against Hillary.
Readers may find this documentary interesting. I doubt the ABC will be running it. This US election matters to so many people around the world. The outcome makes a big difference to climate skeptics. And it’s about so much more than that. How do we beat corruption?
UPDATE: Australia is in this too. Both Gillard and Bishop have contributed $500m Australian taxpayer dollars to Clinton charities [and other Democrat power brokers*].Tony Thomas has those details. “Julia Gillard lavished an unprecedented $292 million in taxpayer dollars on the Clinton-dominated Global Partnership for Education, where she was later appointed chair. Imagine the howls if Tony Abbott had underwritten…” See also “The Clintons and Their Corruptocrats” for even more…
From Breitbart:
The film, based on the New York Times bestselling investigative book Clinton Cash by Breitbart Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer, has sent shockwaves through media. The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, and other Establishment Media have verified and confirmed the book’s explosive revelations about how Hillary Clinton auctioned State Department policies to foreign Clinton Foundation donors and benefactors who then paid Bill Clinton tens of millions of dollars in speaking fees.
The first two minutes tell the Clinton’s narrative. Then the documentary compares the message to the actions.
In 2000, Bill and Hillary Clinton owed millions of dollars in legal debt. Since then, they’ve earned over $130 million. Where did the money come from? Most people assume that the Clintons amassed their wealth through lucrative book deals and high-six figure fees for speaking gigs. Now, Peter Schweizer shows who is really behind those enormous payments.
[Breitbart] Trump won the GOP primary by self-funding his campaign and convincing voters that the lobbyists and other big-money donors would never control him like a puppet.
And Clinton’s selection of Kaine will allow Trump to run on the same themes in the general election by painting Clinton and Kaine as career politicians who have needed—and used—government their for personal gain.
At the GOP convention, Eric Trump, Trump’s son, urged voters to “vote for the one candidate that does not need this job.”
UPDATE: The link still works for me, but may not for others. See comments #8 and #9 below. VinceOz and Evo of Gong.
h/t Pat.
*Correction, thanks to Bob D. The half billion was not just to the Clinton Foundation but to Democrat powerbrokers etc as well.
Depends what you mean by “life” I guess. Some like the world 2 degrees cooler, and some prefer to keep their heads.
“As we were working together on the challenge of [ISIS] and terrorism,” Kerry said. “It’s hard for some people to grasp it, but what we–you–are doing here right now is of equal importance because it has the ability to literally save life on the planet itself.”
It’s good to know the US will be well defended against an invasion of badly gassed fridges.
Since warming is mostly beneficial this threat is at the Defcon-Toothfairy level. And probably not that high. The extra energy trapped by HFC refrigerant gasses most likely just reroutes and escapes to space through water vapor emissions.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The most important price in our economy is set by a bunch of bureaucrats. They are unelected and unaccountable. But your day to day life is affected by their decisions, as well as your ability to buy a house or for your retirement savings to maintain their value. Some people are wiped out by a mere phrase in a memo. There is a deep Soviet style management program at the centre of all Western economies. It’s time we talked about that ogre.
Vladimir Lenin advocated: “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.” True or not, we seem hellbent on finding out.
Dark times are coming:
The BIS has rung the alarms. We are warned that the world’s most reckless monetary experiment, which has taken interest rates to the lowest in recorded history, is failing. Central bankers remain silent, not knowing how or when to end what they began, while the political class simply looks on, impotent and mired in its own economic mistakes.
This leaves only the market’s invisible and heavy hand to make the required adjustments. What follows will be indiscriminate, unpredictable, socially far-reaching and, politically ugly.
Central banks drive the economy at breakneck speed
Central banks keep interest rates artificially low. This pumps up a sick economy, by effectively “printing” money. (Technically, it makes money cheap to borrow into existence creating bank “credit”). This is a gold plated Christmas present for high risk speculators, but it’s taken from people who work for their money. It’s like toxoplasmosis for savers — their savings are silently eaten away by inflation as borrowers outspend them with money they did not earn. Savers have to adopt high risk behaviours to stay afloat and keep their purchasing power from sinking in a river of money.
Easy money generates cycles of boom and bust that wipe out life savings. No one can do hourly work for 40 years, then live off the pitiful interest paid on the money saved. Instead everyone has to “invest” and speculate whether they like it or not. And thus do local councilors get eaten by Goldman Sachs traders for breakfast. What kind of culture do we want? Easy credit favours aggressive takeovers, and hostile, predatory market behaviour. Central banks control so many aspects of our lifestyle, yet we can’t vote them out.
More bad debt can’t fix a problem created with bad debt
We’re up to the third round of bubbles. The addiction to easy credit has reached the end stage when each injection is almost impotent. Printing money doesn’t create euphoria, or even growth, it just puts off judgement day.
The “fastest warming place” on Planet Earth wasn’t warming.
A new Antarctic study wipes out 20 years of panic about the West Antarctic Peninsula. All these years while people were crying about penguins, it turns out that the place was cooling rather than warming. Mankind has emitting a third of all its “CO2-pollution” ever from 1998, and there was “no discernible” effect on Antarctica. Indeed, the study quietly finds that even the bigger longer warming that has happened in the last century was not “unprecedented” in the last 2000 years.
In the last decade as this cooling trend was happening in the real world — in the media, the same spot was being described as “one of the fastest warming places on Earth”:
And this sort of news has been going on for years. This was “big deal” once-in-2000 year type stuff:
UK scientists say parts of Antarctica have recently been warming much faster than most of the rest of the Earth. They believe the warming is probably without parallel for nearly two thousand years. — BBC, 2001
But the news in 2016 was a bit of a bomb, prone to being misinterpreted, so the PR Team was pre-armed with excuses, from the first line of the scientific abstract which pretty much says that the peninsula still was one of the fastest warming places on Earth (if you look at warming from 1950 and ignore the last 20 years the study is studying). Great opening line. The abstract also mentions that the Antarctic peninsula is only 1% of the Antarctic (though no one seems to mention that when it was melting).
The cooling is natural and temporary (Hey, how do they know? They know because the models which didn’t predict the cooling are still predictingit will warm).
“The study does not suggest that global warming has been halted…” (because it would not get published in Nature if they did).
It’s just a coincidence that global temperatures “paused” during the same years — this has nothing to do with the “haitus”. (Methinks someone is still hurting from skeptics mentioning “the pause”.)
Here’s a goodie: “It hasn’t cooled nearly as much as it had warmed before,” Steig said. (Like 20-year-trends only mattered before 1998. After that, who cares?)
Trite excuses make subheader status: “Long-term changes have year-to-year variability: researcher” (Like that’s news? No one seems to put that in a sub-heading when it’s a warm year. Is the aim here just to bore people into not reading the article?)
Distractions make subheader status: This news about cooling is not important — what really matters is ____ (insert anything else)____. Eg. The real threat is ocean warming: Leeds researcher
The Antarctic Peninsula has been cooling, but that doesn’t disprove global warming
Spin the meaning
No matter how much it cools, it still warming:
“We’re certainly not saying that global warming has stopped. On the contrary, we’re highlighting the complexity of climate change.”
Complexity is the excuse for all occasions. Better leave it to experts and don’t think cooling means, y’know, cooling. One hot month is man-made but 20 years of regional cooling means nothing.
Don’t mention the volcanoes
The edge of the Pacific plate, and a volcanic chain runs under those red dots on the map below. Note where the heating is in the paired other map of Antarctica. Hmm? Is magma hot enough to melt ice…
So glaciers could still be melting down this neck of the woods, but there might be natural causes for that too. Likewise oceans may be warming around here as well, but then I don’t suppose anyone at the BBC or ABC will mention the hot magma underfoot.
…
All those past stories that told us manmade emissions were destroying Antarctica — forget them. We don’t know what the cause is:
Indeed, apparently researchers can’t say that human-caused climate change was doing anything to the Antarctic:
Prof Nerilie Abram, at the Australian National University, said: “For a remote place like Antarctica, where climate measurements are especially short and those year-to-year swings in climate are very large, our records really aren’t long enough yet to see the full picture of human-caused climate change.”
Shame they didn’t mention that twenty years ago.
Perhaps they could speak up about the researchers who are making a fuss about other noisy, short data series? Like these ones: Shattered records show climate change is an emergency today, scientists warn.
It’s important never to be surprised
Scientists get shocked, astonished and amazed at events that are not even as bad as their models predicted. But when things are the opposite of what the models said, these are completely… expected:
Prof Andrew Shepherd, at the University of Leeds, said: “It’s completely unsurprising that in any long-term temperature record there will be a decade of measurements that buck the trend. There are few scientists left who believe that atmospheric warming will be the main cause of Antarctic [ice] instability over the next century.
The warming that models projected, Was flawed, as the skeptics expected, With Antarctica cooling, The warmists were fooling, With data which must be corrected.
— Ruairi
REFERENCE
Turner et al (2016) Absence of 21st century warming on Antarctic Peninsula consistent with natural variability, Nature 535, 411–415 doi:10.1038/nature18645
Here’s a memorable moment in international diplomacy:
“You are trying to stifle us,” Duterte said on Monday in widely reported comments. “That’s stupid, I will not honour that. You signed … That was not my signature.”
Duterte said: “I’m mad at this ambassador. I want to kick him,” adding that limits on carbon emissions for the Philippines were “nonsense”.
“You who have reached your peak and along with it spewed a lot of contaminants, emissions … Good for you. We are here, we have not reached the age of industrialisation. We are on our way to it.”
This is a bit of a bummer for the big-government collective. The Philippines has 100 million people and is the 12th biggest country on Earth population-wise.
Brexit, India and the Philippines smell like “Clexit”
The United Nations has issued a plea for nations to fast-track ratification of the Paris Climate Agreement as some countries are backtracking on support for the deal’s sweeping restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.
How about Thursday?
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged nations to attend a “special event” Thursday where they may deposit their “instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession to the Paris Agreement on climate change.”
Progress so far? 177 nations turned up to the Paris party, but only 19 have ratified the agreement in the last six months. It’s not looking good. They need 55 nations which are responsible for 55% of the worlds emissions before the Paris deal gets legs.
Marc Morano, who runs the skeptics’ website Climate Depot, said Tuesday that the cold feet on global warming shows that some countries are realizing the international climate agreement is “not in their best interests.”
“More and more nations are realizing that the U.N. climate treaty is nothing more than an effort to empower the U.N. and attack national sovereignty while doing absolutely nothing for the climate,” said Mr. Morano, who debuted his film “Climate Hustle” during the negotiations in Paris.
He said that the “time has come for a U.S.-led ‘Clexit’ from … the climate treaty.”
In the West we could try to cure cancer faster with research like this, or we could pour billions into making expensive electricity to try to cool the world by 0.01°C for our grandchildren. Hmm. What to do? Which activity is more likely to make citizens richer, happier and more productive?
In this approach (below) bacteria are engineered to find cancer cells, make lots of baby bacteria until they reach a large enough colony size then do a mass self-destructo at the cancer site — releasing a tumor killing drug. A few bacteria survive the micro-apocalypse and they start another round. So far, the researchers haven’t cured any cancers, but they can shrink cancers in mice and extend mousy lives by 50%. One day this might mean cancers can be “lived with”, if not actually destroyed completely.
A critical mass is reached and the colony “bombs”.
So the bacteria can be engineered into neat little machines to manage cancer. But they are still living creatures, so are messy machines. One problem is that evolution tends to make all living machines chuck out bits of DNA that don’t improve survival, so the “survivors” will gradually take over, lose the special engineered addons, and not be so obedient. This approach is not guaranteed to be the right answer. Nonetheless, this sort of research may keep a loved one alive, make a company a lot richer, contribute more tax dollars, save on public health budgets, etc etc.
For perspective, Australia has a $2.4b Emissions Reductions Fund (which is used to make expensive electrons with inefficient solar panels and such-like that the market would not buy otherwise). As a nation we spend about $900m on medical research each year total.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We could double medical research, and halve electricity costs, and have a tax cut.
— Jo
_______________
Synthetic biology used to limit bacterial growth and coordinate drug release
[Sciencedaily] UC San Diego researchers led by Jeff Hasty, a professor of bioengineering and biology, engineered a clinically relevant bacterium to produce cancer drugs and then self-destruct and release the drugs at the site of tumors.
On a good day South Australia has more than 40% renewable energy. On a bad day, it’s -2 or something. Wind towers suck in so many ways. They can even draw more power out than they bring in and best of all — their peak electron sucking power comes just when the state needs electricity the most.
Business blows up as turbines suck more power than they generate
The sapping of power by the turbines during calm weather on July 7 at the height of the crisis, which has caused a price surge, shows just how unreliable and intermittent wind power is for a state with a renewable energy mix of more than 40 per cent.
South Australia has more “renewable” wind power than anywhere else in Australia. They also have the highest electricity bills, the highest unemployment, the largest number of “failures to pay” and disconnections. Coincidence?
The emergency measures are needed to ease punishing costs for South Australian industry as National Electricity Market (NEM) prices in the state have frequently surged above $1000 a megawatt hour this month and at one point on Tuesday hit the $14,000MWh maximum price.
Complaints from business about the extreme prices – in normal times they are below $100 – prompted the state government to ask energy company ENGIE to switch its mothballed Pelican Point gas power station back on.
It’s not just about peak pricing it’s monthly pricing too:
Electricity contracts for delivery in 2017 and 2018 are priced at $91-100MWh in South Australia, compared to $50-63 in Victoria, NSW and Queensland.
South Australian NEM prices have averaged about $360MWh so far this month, Mr Morris said, compared to $80-90MWh in Victoria and NSW.
Statistics from the Australian Energy Regulator showed South Australia already had the highest proportion of disconnections in the nation. From January to March, more than 0.30 per every 100 customers or more than 2,500 South Australian residential customers were disconnected.
This is the wind power contribution in SA for the last two weeks: (this is a typical pattern, see August 2015.)
The current plan is to take this supply disaster and spread it
How much fun can you have? Here’s the total national grid wind power contribution. When the wind doesn’t blow in SA, it also doesn’t blow in NSW, Qld, Victoria and Tas too.
Yet this month the state has run short of power and been hit by spot prices 30 times higher than the eastern states. The government has had to beg electricity suppliers to fire up mothballed gas generators to prevent major industries from shutting down.
In recent months what was once the state’s main electricity generator, the coal-fired station at Port Augusta, was closed permanently because it couldn’t compete with subsidised renewables. Yet when storms rendered the turbines useless — too much wind — the state couldn’t import enough coal-fired power from Victoria. It was caught short and paid a high price. This was an extreme event but South Australians already pay the highest electricity prices in the country and some of the highest in the world.
Doesn’t this look like a great place to build high tech submarines?
Apparently spikes in electricity prices were more common in summer before SA installed a mass of solar panels. They don’t mention monthly power costs. It’s all a big conspiracy. Blame the Murdoch media pack and the importance of “smashing monopolies”. Somehow Australian corporates foolishly bray in support of the “energy oligopoly”, unlike the wise subsidy-sucking likes of Apple and Google in the US.
Marvel that in green commentary there is an assumption that our companies are so stupid they don’t support the “cheapest” form of electricity. As if the big miners like BHP Billiton, Arrium and Nyrstar haven’t sliced and diced the numbers on their electricity bills to the nth degree.
Here’s UNemployment around Australia:
Tell me again how many jobs renewable energy creates?
The 6th richest guy in the US and the head of a major media corporation made it clear last December:
“No CEO could survive if they tried to say climate change isn’t real,” Bloomberg said, offering a suggestion for why Fox News rarely features business leaders to tout climate sceptic positions. | BusinessGreen Dec 4th 2015
What about business leaders who just have a few doubts? He’s got that covered too:
“You don’t sit there and say ‘I’m not sure it’s a real risk’. “ Bloomberg said.
Apparently the Big Fear of Michael Bloomberg and Mark Carney (head of the Bank of England) is that a few business leaders will start asking questions or speaking their minds, and we can’t have that.
Successful entrepreneurs could be quite a scary force if many of them started speaking out. They have clout. They are not the gullible types and if they paid attention to this debate or even asked good questions, the whole House of Carbon would come undone so easily. That’s why it’s a big No No for leaders to ask questions, the believers know they don’t have the answers.
These kinds of warnings need to be unpacked and discussed or they work. Business leaders who are willing to pander to the meme will still issue press releases and earn Bloomberg brownie points (or at least stay of the target), but those with doubts may feel intimidated and silenced. This stops those annoying independent thinkers from congregating and cooperating.
But real leaders speak their minds. They don’t fall for this naked gambit.
The message to CEO’s — Call their bluff… ask smart questions because investors can spot the fakes.
The one thing Malcolm Turnbull has got right in the last year? Out with Greg Hunt, and in with Josh Frydenberg.
The new ministry has been announced, as predicted, without magnanimity, wisdom or grace. There is no role for Tony Abbott; Turnbull is still too afraid of him. But Greg Hunt has finally been moved out of the Environment portfolio which can only be a good thing. He has been a key proponent of passionate and pointless action on the weather, and was central to stopping a BOM audit and bringing in a carbon tax. Almost any other minister might actually try to get better science (see here and here), and solve real environmental problems instead of fake ones. Perhaps finally an environment minister may recognise that we need temperature data that can be independently replicated if we are ever going to understand the Australian climate?
The Dept of Environment has been merged with Energy which makes sense for carbon traders and the renewables industry, but perhaps not for the environment.
Former Greens leader Bob Brown said Mr Frydenberg would bury Australia’s environmental hopes and aspirations.
“The pro-nuclear, pro-coal Frydenberg has been whingeing about environmental campaigns against him in his seat of Kooyong,” Mr Brown said.
He has previously supported an end to Victoria’s moratorium on onshore gas exploration and praised Margaret Thatcher’s record on environment and climate change.
Greenpeace campaigner Nikola Casule said Mr Frydenberg’s views on climate change were “an embarrassing relic from a different era”.
RenewEconomy likewise tells me that Frydenberg can’t be too bad:
The Victoria MP has long been a supporter of nuclear energy, and has shown he is also a strong supporter of the coal industry, recently insisting it had a strong future, describing it as a “living, breathing, success story.”
He said that given the enormous funding needs for clean infrastructure — he estimates at somewhere between $5 trillion and $7 trillion a year — investment opportunities will rebound.
If clean green energy was efficient, cheap and reliable there would be no “funding need” as the market would leap to exploit that opportunity. Instead most leading investors act like they are skeptics. The fact that central bankers are selling it so aggressively says a lot. Perhaps central bankers want to help the poor and save the world, or could it be that the entire financial industry will profit from a fake, forced market and another fiat currency? What are the brokerage fees on a $7T market…
Again we get this “free market” myth:
[Carbon pricing is the cleanest way for markets to judge the tangible exposure to climate change,” said Carney
…
Carbon pricing has failed to change the weather all over the world. Free markets don’t work when they aren’t free and when they apply to a ubiquitous molecule involved in almost every life form on the planet. And what does “clean pricing” mean anyway? The cost benefit assessment of using solar panels to reduce your exposure to flood damage in 2100 is as filthy-dirty-a-calculation as anything gets. Calculations don’t get messier, blacker or more pointless than this. Crunch those numbers and then bury them in 6 feet of volcanic ash.
The idea of slapping a market onto a product that is mostly produced and consumed by nature is bizarre in the extreme. Almost none of players in a global carbon market will respond to the incentives on offer. The Pacific Ocean won’t buy a credit, and nor will phytoplankton, cows, sheep or yeast. Even in the 4% of the market controlled by humans, demand is “inelastic”, meaning the costs of energy already force most of the market to be efficient. The gains that are left are minor, pathetic creeping improvements. So sweeping, economy wide measures are inefficient, even if the IPCC models weren’t broken.
Something suddenly changed in December last year in the world’s second largest economy (some say it’s the first). For the last few years private investors in China have been running away at a faster and faster pace. Apparently, no one wants to invest in the Chinese economy except the government, and six months ago, the State launched a rocket.
The massive growth of China is partly thanks to rampant money-printing. Say hello to Malinvestment. The Chinese economy is sick. It’s distraction time. Anyone want to stoke a war?
…
I saw the graph on the ABC news last night thanks to Phillip Lasker. The original graph came from Bloomberg under this unlikely headline:
“Stoking Growth” is not always desirable — to go biological — cancer “stokes growth” and so does Ebola.
“The amount of cash Beijing is shoveling into the economy is stunning,” said Andrew Collier, an independent analyst in Hong Kong and former president of Bank of China International USA. “Given high fixed-asset investment among state-owned enterprises, it’s likely most of it is being consumed by the inefficient state sector. This is more bad news for structural reform. ”
After so many repetitions, these events are now actually insults. They are not about the victims. They are about the mourners. They are indulgent displays of emotion that serve only to generate soothing feelings of moral comfort and to mask what should be a united and righteous fury.
Tonight’s attendees should consider this. While you see every lit candle as a poignant reminder of life’s tragic fragility, Islamic State sees them as post-game bonus points.
I know people want to talk about the atrocity in France. I wish. But thanks to Section 18C you will have to talk in other nations where offending someone is not an offence. Or perhaps if you are lucky you might be able to discuss this somewhere in Oz where they have paid staff to moderate and lawyerate. See also Andrew Bolt’s: We cannot keep living in this fear.
Heartfelt thoughts to the victims and their families on a dark day.
Don’t underestimate the Brexit effect. The landscape is shifting.
The Paris agreement just became less likely. The UK Dept of the environment will submerge, and Boris Johnson, the outspoken skeptic and Brexit figurehead, has been promoted to foreign minister.
Britain no longer has“the greenest government ever.” This is good news. Very good news. The agonised screeching of all the usual suspects in the Environmental movement will be enough to sustain many of us in lols for weeks and months to come.
Five years ago, could we imagine an “infamous climate denier” like Boris rewarded in any Western Government? There were closet skeptics in the cabinet, but that’s not the same. In Australia, Tony Abbott once said climate change was “crap” and somehow still managed to become PM, but once he was, his official line was the permitted global warming story. ( He pandered, but in the most sensible possible way. And because he did not flagrantly add to the climate slush fund they still called him a “denier” but he rarely said anything openly skeptical.).
To have Boris in such an influential position is new ground. No more pandering.
For more than 20 years now, we have been told that this country was going to get hotter and hotter…
That’s what they said: the BBC, and all the respectable meteorologists
They [home owners with pools] thought they were doing the sensible thing and getting ready for a Californian lifestyle – and they were fools! Fools who believed that the global warming soothsayers really meant what they said or that they had a clue what the weather would be in the next 10 years.
A lot of fence sitters have just been offered a ladder on the skeptic side of the fence. This makes it so much easier for people to “come out”.
The UK Dept of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) will be folded
Business will get control over energy and climate policy. Greens will cry. The Business portfolio has other agendas. It’s existence does not depend on whether we can change the weather.
What about Theresa May?
I confess to being skeptical. (Boris for PM!) How could any sensible person campaign for Remain? But not only has May appointed Boris, but her right hand man on UK Steel and climate policy type stuff has called the Climate Change Act a “unilateral and monstrous act of self-harm”. Furthermore, Paul Matthews looked at her voting record in detail and suspects she may be a quiet climate policy skeptic.
James Forsyth in the Spectator, says May is serious about Brexit:
Obviously the true evil people are the people who watch Fox.
“Put more colorfully, Americans who are watching Fox News instead of attending church on Sunday morning appear to be particularly uninterested in buying with the environment in mind,” said Ecklund, who is also director of Rice’s Religion and Public Life Program. “It would stand to reason that those who participate in their houses of worship and who tend to be more engaged in civic life may have less time to be exposed to such media and therefore be less likely to follow the politicized conservative ‘line’ with respect to the environment.”
So, both Christians and conservatives are dump people who are fooled by Fox. But Christians are a bit more useful, not because they have higher values, but because they miss the Sunday morning Fox dose. It’s hard to imagine how this analysis could be more patronizing.
Peifer and Ecklund said they hope the study will challenge stereotypes about how religion relates to environmental care.
Right, because there is a stereotype that conservative Christians want to pillage the Earth?
Academics have a couple of stereotypes themselves:
That environmental consumption helps the environment.
The Fox information is “bad” and that other media is “good”.
The authors of this study appear to be struggling under a few of their own prejudices. Look for cause and effect here:
“We suspect that a religious identity tends to diminish political conservatism’s negative impact on environmental consumption because religious identification encourages people to seek out visible behaviors (such as environmentally friendly behaviors) that demonstrate the value of their faith,” said Elaine Howard Ecklund, the study’s principal investigator and the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences at Rice, and Jared Peifer, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of management at Baruch.
What does it even mean? “…religious identification encourages people to seek out visible behaviors that demonstrate the value of their faith…”
What about an invisible behaviours? What if some people do something because they think it might be… (here’s a radical thought) good to do, as in a net benefit to humanity, not because of how it “looks” or what it demonstrates? That sounds kind of Christian.
Here’s another idea for academic study: Do non-religious people seek out visible (but pointless, or even destructive) behaviours to demonstrate their, um, “faith”, beliefs and tribal affiliation?
The ultimate left wing voter Car Bumper Sticker costs $7. (What kind of bumper does this go on?)
UPDATED:See below for Stephen McIntyre’s response, with details of emails showing that Joelle Gergis did not independently discover the problem but learnt of it from Climate Audit.
The Gergis hockeystick was heralded in the media for a week in 2012 before it was cut apart online and months later, quietly withdrawn. Headlines raved that Australia was having the “hottest years in the millennium”. As I said at the time, it was all silly beyond belief — the whole study relied on two bunches of trees in Tasmania and New Zealand to tell us that the greater continental area was 0.09°C warmer now than it was in 1000AD. If trees in yonder Tassie can tell the whole continental temperature to a tenth of a degree, who needs thermometers (especially the kind which need 2 degree corrections)? Why does the BOM bother today?
Part II of this sorry paper has arrived under this auspicious headline at The Conversation:
According to Joelle Gergis, skeptics found just “one typo”, and in Gergis’ own words “Instead of taking the easy way out and just correcting the single word in the page proof, we”...“set about rigorously checking and rechecking every step of our study.”
As you would right? The typo was so trivial Team-Gergis went on to take four more years to do “…three extra rounds of peer-review” with “four new peer-reviewers”, not to mention “countless rounds of internal revisions made by our research team and data contributors.”
I bet Gergis wishes she had got that word right in the first place.
All up, the paper went through “nine rounds of revisions, and was assessed a total of 21 times.” Gergis proudly says: “One reviewer even commented that we had done “a commendable, perhaps bordering on an insane, amount of work”.
Insane is the word. This is setting a new bar in scientific hair shirts. You would almost think Joelle Gergis felt guilty for something?
Welcome to a university-world dilemma: should I correct one word or do four years hard labour?
Then again, perhaps The Typo did matter?
UPDATE: It’s not a “typo”, it’s a “bug”. As Dean from Ohio adds: “A typo is in text, where it can usually be detected and autocorrected, as it were, by the reader. A mistake in software (computer code) is called a bug, not a typo, and can hardly ever be detected and corrected mentally because the information space of all possible program outputs is so vast. “
Gergis writes about the skeptics who found the typo/bug:
Enter the bloggers
It turned out that someone else had spotted the typo too. Two days after we identified the issue, a commenter on the Climate Audit blog also pointed it out.
The website’s author, Stephen McIntyre, proceeded to claim (incorrectly) that there were “fundamental issues” with the study. It was the start of a concerted smear campaign aimed at discrediting our science.
McIntyre’s helpful corrections (thanks to Nick Stokes and Jean S.) are associated with “a smear campaign”. In the same vein, an unkind soul might reply that the bloggers were only correcting what was a shameless self-serving media push to get alarmist headlines.
Note that McIntyre is described as a “website author”, just a blogger. They could have described him as a published scientific author with a track record of finding holes in these kinds of papers. (Are the editors at The Conversation feeling threatened by independent, unfunded citizen scientists?)
What bad luck for Gergis that she discovered the mistakes two days before McIntyre and co, but didn’t think to email the hockeystick expert himself, so he could help spread the word and correct the misinformation going out over the media. I’m sure McIntyre would have been interested, and happy to pass on her correction. (See his reply below, her claims are a “fantasy”).
The new graph of the last thousand years in Australia
Four years work, and one word typo corrected, this below is the new graph. Notice how modern times are as hot as 1300AD but only when instrumental records (the orange line) are compared to tree rings. One day, when Tasmania gets trees again, we will be able to compare tree rings to tree rings.
There may (hopefully) be other historic proxies involved this time, but a proxy is a proxy. If it works in 1300AD, why doesn’t it work in 2000AD?
…
If we just look at the black PCR construction it would appear that all the extra CO2 didn’t make much difference. The proxy record has shown more variability, and similar temperatures when CO2 levels were supposedly perfect.
Climate scientists used natural climate indicators, such as tree rings, corals and cave records, in conjunction with climate modeling to delve a thousand years back into the region’s temperature history. — Phys Org
“Analysis of climate model simulations shows that the warming experienced since 1950 cannot be explained by natural factors alone, highlighting the role of human caused greenhouse gases in the recent warming of the region.”
So there you have it. Models that don’t work in this millennia, and don’t explain the bumps of the past millennia, also cannot explain the current bump. That’s modern science: you get 95% certainty and argument from ignorance in the same sentence.
Tell us how good peer review is again
Gergis was not happy that her paper was used to show how flawed peer review was:
Former geologist and prominent climate change sceptic Bob Carter published an opinion piece in The Australian claiming that the peer-review process is faulty and climate science cannot be trusted.
Then again, Bob had a point. Gergis used 300,000 dollars and took three years to produce a flawed paper. Bloggers corrected Gergis’ mistake for free in three weeks. Peer review had missed it completely in the first place, then took four years to get it right.
What about those error margins
As Mike E then pointed out in comments, the error margin in 2012 was larger than the result:
“The average reconstructed temperature anomaly in Australasia during A.D. 1238–1267, the warmest 30-year pre-instrumental period, is 0.09°C (±0.19°C) below 1961–1990 levels.”
Still hopefully, they fixed “one typo” and the uncertainty estimates. Looks like the hottest 30 year period back then, and reported to hundredths of a degree, may not have turned out to be the hottest thirty year period of that era in the new study.
Not so unprecedented
The new press release even admits things have been just as warm in Australia all those years ago:
“Analysis based on the smallest subset of the palaeoclimate data network suggests that single 30-year and 10-year periods of comparable temperatures to late 20th century levels may have occurred during the first half of the millennium.
That’s a fundamentally different announcement to the headlines the paper scored in 2012:
The Guardian: “Australasia has hottest 60 years in a millennium, scientists find”;
The story was on ABC 24 and ABC news where Gergis proclaimed:” there are no other warm periods in the last 1000 years that match the warming experienced in Australasia since 1950.”
Where is the honesty in the Gergis essay that the conclusions of the new version are quite different and the past headlines were wrong?
UPDATE:From Stephen McIntyre
Gergis’ account of events is a fantasy. Among other things, her claim to have discovered the error two days prior to Climate Audit is a fabrication. The issue of ex post screening was raised at Climate Audit on May 31, with particular concern over spurious regression between trends. Gergis et al was defended by a couple of commenters who pointed out that Gergis’ correlations were (supposedly) done using de-trended series. Jean S then checked this claim, pointing out that their correlations failed with detrended data, from which we concluded that they had not done their calculation the way that they claimed. Jean S comment was posted on June 5 16:42 blog time (-5). This was 23:42 Swiss time (+2) and 7:42 am June 6 AET (+10).
Neukom sent Gergis an email notifying her of the problem at June 6 9:46 am AET (+10), June 6 1:46 am Switzerland (+2). Neukom, Gergis and Karoly then discussed the bad news.
Both at the time and in her recent article, Gergis claimed that they had discovered the problem “independently” of Climate Audit, but this is contradicted by emails showing that they had been reading Climate Audit and by the above timeline.
There are of course many other untruths in her article.
UPDATE #2:
From data that’s mangled and squeezed,
One tenth degree warming is teased,
As a trend to be claimed,
And on mankind is blamed,
To keep global warmists appeased.
John Ioannidis paints a picture of a vast hive of researchers all pushed to publish short papers that are mostly a waste of time. The design is bad, the results useless (even when meta-collated with other badly designed studies). Basically, humankind is pouring blood, sweat and tears into spinning wheels in medicine — just paper churn. Most papers will never help a patient.
Ioannidis wants rigor – full registration before the study, full transparency afterwards, fewer studies over all, but with better design. Astonishingly, fully 85% of what is spent on clinical trials is wasted. It’s really a pretty big scandal, given that lives are on the line. I can’t see the media or pollies joining the dots. Imagine how many quality life-years are being burnt at the stake of the self-feeding Science-PR-Industry.
And this is clinical medical research, where standards are higher than in many other scientific areas and where there are easily defined terms of success unlike “blue sky” studies. Ioannidis doesn’t say it directly, but his description of the effect current funding has (which is almost all government based) almost guarantees that researchers will be wasting time in the paper churn — fast, short papers of little importance, that may even be false, but even if true are useless, insignificant. This is what happens when science is controlled by a government monopsony. The aim is the press release, not the patient.
Science can’t be done by an indexed formula or citiation score. Money can’t be spent wisely that way either. Someone needs to be responsible.
How much of climate research is a waste of money? A lot more than in clinical medicine.
Jo
Conclusion
Overall, not only are most research findings false, but, furthermore, most of the true findings are not useful. Medical interventions should and can result in huge human benefit. It makes no sense to perform clinical research without ensuring clinical utility. Reform and improvement are overdue.
The sheer size of the waste and the industry — 85% of a million papers
There are many millions of papers of clinical research—approximately 1 million papers from clinical trials have been published to date, along with tens of thousands of systematic reviews—but most of them are not useful. Waste across medical research (clinical or other types) has been estimated as consuming 85% of the billions spent each year [1]. I have previously written about why most published research is false [2] and how to make more of it true [3].
Clinical research remains extremely expensive, even though an estimated 90% of the present cost of trials could be safely eliminated [26,27]. Reducing costs by streamlining research could do more than simply allow more research to take place. It could help make research better by reducing the pressure to cut corners, which leads to studies lacking sufficient power, precision, duration, and proper outcomes to convincingly change practice.
The problem is the research funding:
Current research funding incentivizes small studies of short duration that can be quickly performed and generate rapidly publishable results, while answering important questions may sometimes require long-term studies whose financial needs exceed the resources of most currently available funding cycles.
One suggestion to improve research funding:
One to two percent of the sales of blockbuster drugs diverted in such a pool [52] could earmark ample funding.
We knew it was going to happen sometime. Shorten has conceded defeat. Turnbull stays on as a weakened PM.
It’s a Delcon win
For Defcons / Delcons this outcome was close to as good as it gets. How could an unfunded, disorganized group vote for “not Turnbull” without handing the government to a Labor-Green group? Individual voters can’t vote for a “hung weak government”. For a whole glorious week Turnbull has been tortured with calls for his resignation with his faults laid out bare. Several Turnbull supporters were targeted and removed. The antithesis of the hard left (Pauline Hanson) has gained a voice. The Nationals grew stronger and the Liberals were punished.
All this, despite the mainstream media barely mentioning Delcons, and hardly ever interviewing minor party candidates (except for Greens). This result was achieved despite GetUP running a $3m dollar campaign* in exactly the opposite direction targeting Abbott supporters.
Sinclair Davidson (and many in the pro-Turnbull camp) are declaring that Abbott would have lost, but they use polls from a year ago, or polls about a man who didn’t campaign to be PM. And we all know how reliable polls are. Turnbull nearly lost the election because he wouldn’t fight on the issues that won Abbott the landslide victory. His judgement was awful and shown to be so. Shorten was a weak opponent. Just say “Rudd-Gillard-Rudd”, mention the boats, and remind everyone Bill voted for the Carbon Tax lie and expensive electricity. A real small government leader would explain that Shorten debt would drive the nation to rack and ruin and risk Medicare. Throwing away Pink Batts- and-windmills-money means less to spend on environment and health. Waste kills.
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The good news is that a majority of people are aware of media bias, and are skeptical of what the media tells them. The bad news is that this is just another marker showing the average Western citizen is losing faith in the integrity of so many key institutions.
H/t to 
The 
For Defcons / Delcons this outcome was close to as good as it gets. How could an unfunded, disorganized group vote for “not Turnbull” without handing the government to a Labor-Green group? Individual voters can’t vote for a “hung weak government”. For a whole glorious week Turnbull has been tortured with calls for his resignation with his faults laid out bare. Several Turnbull supporters were targeted and removed. The antithesis of the hard left (Pauline Hanson) has gained a voice. The Nationals grew stronger and the Liberals were punished.
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