Last night we saw two full indulgent minutes on our ABC national news broadcast (from 12:25 mins) on the death of the unfortunate Maria Strydom, as she tried to descend Mt Everest. My issue is not with her, but with the ABC choice of national priorities. The 34 year old climber ticked all the PC boxes, a vegan academic in pursuit of better holidays. The ABC lost one of their tribe. But where are the accolades for the 50 people have died already this year doing their jobs in Australia, like the farmers and miners who die supporting their families?
The effusive coverage did not mention the phrase “unnecessary risk”. It was just a straight out tragedy. (A very first world kind of one).
There was an unbridled virtue message about hallowed university experts:
“…intellectually, reaching a PhD by age 30 — massive achievement”
“…celebrate the life of people like Maria — who actually did what she loved”
ABC narrator James Hancock revealingly sums it up: “…risking their lives in pursuit of the ultimate goal”
Because in ABC-world, “the ultimate goal” is adventure for self-gratification?
The news article did not mention that she has said she was climbing to show the world that vegans can do anything. Neither does this ABC feature.
The DailyMail does:
Weeks before her death Dr Strydom told how she and her husband wanted to dispel the belief that vegans were ‘weak’ or ‘malnourished’ by taking on the climb.
‘It seems that people have this warped idea of vegans being malnourished and weak.
‘By climbing the seven summits we want to prove that vegans can do anything and more,’ she said in an interview with the university where she worked.
Strydom’s death is a sad event, a horrible waste, and my sympathies go to her family and friends — as with the unnamed truck driver. It’s the ABC coverage that says a lot about “their ABC”. The ABC makes political points with deaths through editing choices. They are silent on some deaths while lauding others for “getting a PhD before 30″.All hail the academics? I’m sure Maria’s family are in a place no one wants to be in today, and they probably found great comfort in the news piece. That’s a good thing, but ask if our $1b news program ought to spend more time on policies that affect most Australians instead. This is bread and circuses stuff.
UPDATE: ROM in comments points out that there are risky research projects, set up by an Australian, which break new ground testing gliders to 90,000ft. The ABC has mentioned these in local Newcastle stories and a local video but no national prime time coverage that I can find.
Could it be the missing key?The solar wind blasts charged particles, electrons, stuff, towards Earth at 500 km a second — that’s one to two million miles per hour. It speeds up, slows down and shifts in direction as it travels past the Earth and has its own magnetic field. The wind speed varies from 300 km per second up to 800 and the impact on Earth changes with our magnetic field and our seasons. You might think this kind of monster flow might have some effect on our climate. But modern climate models are 95% certain that none of this matters. Only crazy people would think that a electrons flying past at a million miles per hour could “do something” to our stratosphere, or ozone, or cloud cover.
Curiously, a recent study shows that when the solar wind is fastest, the North Atlantic is coldest on the surface. The NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation) appears to correlate. The effect is strongest in the northern winter months. Notably the modern expert climate models fail to predict any of the cycles within our major ocean basins. How immature is our understanding of space weather?
Could changes in the solar wind be the driver of the NAO? Will it turn out to be the mechanism for Force N or D?
Fig. 2. Seasonal mean spatial distribution of the correlation between SWS and SST; for MAM (a), JJA (b), SON (c), and DJF (d). The solid dark lines are the boundaries of the regions where the statistical confidence exceeds 99% with the t-test and the dashed dark lines are the boundaries of the regions where the statistical confidence exceeds 95%.
The solar-wind speeds peak about 3 or 4 years after the TSI and sunspots peak in each cycle. That doesn’t suggest the one solar cycle lag we are looking for. Perhaps if we had more data on solar wind speeds we could figure out whether the wind speeds correlated with the TSI in the cycle earlier?
[Forbes] This case is one of several similar cases in federal district courts in Oregon and Washington, and in the state courts of North Carolina, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Colorado. All of these legal cases are supported by Our Children’s Trust, that seeks the legal right of our youth to a healthy atmosphere and stable climate in the future.
How about the legal right of our youth to live in a sustainable civilization? What if a stable climate costs more than a stable economy can afford?
Other parents might hope their children have the right to inherit a stable currency, and a government without trillions in debt.
Championed by Professor Mary Christina Wood in the Law School at the University of Oregon under the idea of Atmospheric Trust Litigation, these lawsuits claim that a government elected by the people and for the people has a duty to protect the natural systems required for the people’s survival.
So if the government is elected by the people to make these kinds of decisions, why is a court deciding public policy? The children of Massachusetts are free to set up a political party to slow storms and keep the temperatures stable, no matter what the cost. (They’re called The Greens).
Chris Servheen, a bear biologist and Adjunct Associate Research Professor at the University of Montana, said sightings of this hybrid bear species have been very rare in the past.
“But they seem to be more common now,” he said.
Mr Servheen said not very much was known about the grolar and pizzly bears, as little contact had yet to be made between them and humans.
The recent photo of what many suspect to be one of the hybrid bears was posted on Facebook…
That’ll be one data point confirmed then?
Mr Servheen said it was hard to know how many of the bears existed.
In 2006 a bear shot by hunters in the Arctic was tested and confirmed as a polar-grizzly hybrid.
So if a scientist reported that thermometers “seem” to be more near airport tarmacs than they were in 1910, with a photo of an unconfirmed one on facebook, would that be worth an interview, ABC feature and a photo? Can someone ask the ABC’s Sarah Sedghi — I know someone she should talk to.
Don’t look now. Might be another negative feedback the modelers forgot. When the cold arctic warms up, there are more plants and less tough old moss. The real, err, surprise — was what happened to the bacteria and fungi. The micro-critters that normally decompose organic matter are pretty happy about the switch from tough moss to tasty tundra shrubs (or in this case, to cake, I’ll explain in a minute). They adapt in a jiffy to chewing through the freshly dead bits of gourmet plants with more nitrogen. So instead of decomposing more in warmer weather, the soils got richer with carbon and decomposed less.
After reading the press release, I watched the video and was a bit surprised to find them seeding the ground with sugar, rather than gourmet arctic plants. I’m a bit underwhelmed by the study design. Though the end result sounds believable because life on Earth spent 500 million years figuring out ways to suck that CO2 out of the sky.
The researchers even suggest this might slow global warming. If it does, it will be a symbolic, unmeasureable semi-hundredth of a degree. But perhaps the nicest thing about this is that at Lund University there are still researchers allowed to put out press releases suggesting “good news” for the climate.
The NSW Labor spokesman for Energy, Adam Searle, has described Mr Massy-Greene’s stance as “disturbing” and is calling for him to clarify his views or resign.
“If he is a climate change skeptic then his position as chair of publicly owned electricity businesses is untenable”, says Mr Searle.
“If Mr Massy-Green won’t resign, the Baird Government, which appointed him, needs to sack him.”
Amazing. Just to have ever sent an email praising the skeptics handbook years before he was appointed.
Are you now, or have you ever been a skeptic?
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Streisand Effect coming
Nearly 7 years ago Roger Massy-Greene sent an email around to around 200 VIP’s with a link to the Skeptics Handbook saying “the best piece I have seen on global warming, and helps to explain what has so far been a very confusing debate.”Mr Massy-Greene later became chairman of Endeavour Energy — a state owned company that officially describes global warming as “the single greatest environmental challenge”. The ABC are now digging up the old email as a sign that perhaps Massy-Greene might still have doubts about the religion. Oh the scandal?
The free booklet done by a volunteer (moi) was distributed to a quarter of a million people and translated into eighteen languages by volunteers. This is the booklet that was too dangerous to allow a former MP to carry into Parliament House. The Handbook, and the worldwide grassroots movement it represented, was not important enough for the ABC to mention to its audience but a six year old email about it suddenly is?
Massy-Greene and his wife, Sydney University chancellor Belinda Hutchinson, are such capitalist sods they’ve donated $1 million to Sydney University to help get better graduates of STEM courses teaching at Sydney schools. The ABC don’t mention that, but they do mention that one company of his, donated $5000 to a Liberal politician.
The ABC: where investigating is done with one eye
Angela Lavoipierre, ABC, found time to get a comment from Tim Flannery, but didn’t tell the audience the email was from 2009, didn’t ask me to reply, nor would she link to the Skeptics Handbook. Too afraid ABC readers might actually read it? The ABC is a billion dollar Labor-Green advertising scheme.
Comments under the article yesterday included ones that were critical of the poor journalism, and of the man-made climate scare. Most or maybe all those comments have now been removed, and the original story quietly updated. (Google cache copy, of the article, shows the original, but doesn’t show the comments that were removed, not even a “Snip”). Where’s the honesty?
Nearly eight years after I started the blog with The Skeptics Handbook, it has stood the test of time — there’s not much I would change. Indeed here’s John Cook’s attempted take-down “Guide“, and here’s where I explain all Cook’s Unskeptical mistakes in it. Such is the bizarre state of the climate debacle — he took two years and had help from four funded professors yet find no mistakes. I took four days to document his and didn’t leave a point standing. He had no reply.
Flannery calls the Handbook “rubbish” – Tell us more Tim!
Leading climate scientist, Professor Tim Flannery from the Climate Council, described The Skeptics Handbook as “absolute rubbish”.
“I’m astonished that anyone in any sort of position of responsibility could take it the slightest bit seriously,” he told Hack.
…because people who disagree with the permitted science doctrine hide in dark places, right?
Presumably Flannery and political activists at the ABC hope to roast them one by one. But wouldn’t they get a surprise if they found out how many chairmen, investors, and politicians also sent around an email of something skeptical? They have no idea how many there are.
Professor Flannery said it was good to know where Mr Massy-Greene stood.
“One benefit that’s come from this sorry tale is that some clumsy thumbs have revealed the true character of an important person,” he said.
“We don’t want people lurking in the shadows when they hold important positions and have views of that nature.
“This should be a call to arms to be asking all chairmen and business people where they stand on climate change.”
The ABC is out of control.
UPDATE on irrelevant “apologies”: Looking again at the first article, Angela Lavoipierre makes a big deal that Massy-Greene sent “not one but TWO apologies.” Yet in the email she discloses, he’s apologizing for the sin of the dreaded mass email without BCCing — which presumably set off the usual email firestorm because people hit “reply all”. This has got nothing to do with the climate debate. Why is it national news? Does Lavoipierre hope to fool people that anyone sending a skeptical email should apologize for the content?
It’s another meaningless Reachtel climate poll. Fergus Hunter at the Sydney Morning Herald has been fooled like Turnbull and Shorten, and Rudd and Gillard before them.
It’s the same old Polling Trap. Junk questions produce junk answers.
ReachTel asks motherhood questions about whether people would like to change the weather for free, and get free clean energy too. Who could say no? Without asking “what are you willing to pay?” the question is giving away coffee and cake at the side of road. Better survey’s show 80% of Australians don’t donate to environmental causes or vote for it. How committed are they? Answer, not even ten bucks a year. On flights, not even two bucks a trip. Survey after survey shows that when people rank issues, climate concerns are flat at the bottom of the barrel. Only 3% of US people think climate is most important issue.
Let’s translate that apathy to votes. Tony Abbott ran the 2013 election on the costs of making the weather nice and the people said No. No thanks, and No Way. He won in a landslide. What do people want? Cheaper electricity.
Strong climate change policy is a vote-changing matter for a majority of Australians, a new poll shows, establishing the issue as an important battleground one week into the election campaign.
According to the ReachTEL survey of 2400 people, conducted for a coalition of environmental groups, 64 per cent of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for a party seeking 100 per cent renewable energy in 20 years and 48 per cent said they would be more likely to support a party reducing Australia’s net carbon emissions to zero by 2050.
It’s a survey conducted for green activists – no wonder they don’t mention the money
According to the ReachTEL survey of 2400 people, conducted for a coalition of environmental groups, 64 per cent of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for a party seeking 100 per cent renewable energy in 20 years and 48 per cent said they would be more likely to support a party reducing Australia’s net carbon emissions to zero by 2050.
So how strong is “seeking”? Everyone wants a party that “seeks” the holy grail. Would you turn down 100% free energy. No!
If only it were free. If only it was clean.
When the voters go to the polls very few will put the climate ahead of jobs, health, education and the economy.
The Greens want a 63-82 per cent equivalent cut to emissions and 90 per cent renewable energy by 2030.
Fine, and let the Greens pay for it. If it’s so cheap, if the world is moving to it anyway, who needs government policy to force us to buy “cheap wind”?
From comments : – )
Much climate-change polling today,
Will likely let Greens have their say,
To express their pipe dreams,
On ‘cheap’ energy schemes,
For which they’re unwilling to pay.
If there is anyone out there who hasn’t seen the M.P. Daniel Hannan speech on BREXIT two weeks ago, it’s worth your 6 minutes. It’s articulate. Compelling. Why would any great nation vote to give up their right to set their own laws and negotiate their own deals?
The EU is it’s own best example of big-government grown too big. As Hannan says, the “Every continent on this planet has grown over the past decade except Antartica and the European Union.” And it is so much more than just economics, but economics is the main reason given to stay.
“It’s not just the financial price of EU membership – it’s the democratic price.
We fought a civil war in this country to establish the principle that laws should not be passed nor taxes raised except by our own elected representatives. And now supreme power is held by people who tend to owe their positions to having just lost elections: Peter Mandelson, Neil Kinnock and what have you.
No one is talking about drawbridges or isolation. Nowhere else in the world do countries apologise for wanting to live under their own laws. New Zealand is not about to join Australia. Japan is not applying to join China – and do you hear anyone complaining about these bigoted Sino-sceptics in Tokyo?
It is a natural healthy thing for a democracy to live under its own laws whilst trading with every other country in the world.
The United Kingdom is the world’s fifth-largest country, its fourth-largest military power.
How much bigger do we have to be before we have the confidence to raise our eyes to more distant horizons?
— Daniel Hannan
The other argument to stay revolves around solving “global” problems like climate change. But since these are global, not European, it’s a non-argument (and about a non-problem). Brexit in or Brexit out, it won’t change China’s emissions.
In the West everywhere we need better public debates — we need a discussion of the dangers and costs of big-government.
The liquid iron flowing in the Earth’s core maybe what drives a magnetic field some 40,000 km to 370,000 km out beyond the Earth. The solar field envelopes that. At the layer where these fields interact sometimes the Sun and Earth’s magnetic field lines do something called “reconnecting” — suddenly converting magnetic energy into plasma energy in an explosive way. We’ve finally just measured one event properly for the first time. So a 12,000km ball of lava with a thin crust of rocks and 15 km of damp air, floats in a sea of magnetically charged fields. You might think that our slithery-thin layer of humid air and clouds could be affected by the stirring of “yo-yo” like lava flows and magnetic fields that are also twisted by solar dynamos, but you would just be a silly denier. These magnetic explosions and solar winds can’t possibly affect our climate — there’s a 97% consensus that says so.
Luckily we have climate models that are 95% certain we don’t even need to include these factors — especially lucky, since we barely understand them.
This is after-all, just space weather, and it’s not like the Earth is in space, eh?
Supposedly geomagnetic weather just makes nice aurora’s and mucks up some satellites.
Normally, the [Sun and Earth’s] magnetic fields oppose each other and move in different directions. But every so often the magnetic field lines switch and connect with each other. That’s called a magnetic reconnection event. “When the two magnetic fields link up, then that allows the solar energy to flow straight into the magnetosphere,” said study author Jim Burch, vice president of the space science and engineering at the Southwest Research Institute. “It sets the entire field in motion.” The excited particles from the Sun stream into the magnetic field lines of Earth, transferring energy into the magnetosphere.
This newer “MMS” program uses four machines flying in a 10km pyramid formation in space and works at a nanosecond level. It’s vastly better than any previous efforts.
A useful 3 minute video from NASA about why this program is important from the researchers point of view and what they are hoping to learn. Some cool graphics. (Sorry it’s so big, but I didn’t want to shrink it).
Most people do not give much thought to the Earth’s magnetic field, yet it is every bit as essential to life as air, water and sunlight. The magnetic field provides an invisible, but crucial, barrier that protects Earth from the sun’s magnetic field, which drives a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind outward from the sun’s outer layers. The interaction between these two magnetic fields can cause explosive storms in the space near Earth, which can knock out satellites and cause problems here on Earth’s surface, despite the protection offered by Earth’s magnetic field.
The Sydney Morning Herald lauds the Queensland Academic who won an award and busted four myths. The fake expert tosses out non-sequitur red herrings and strawmen, ignores some of the largest forces of nature in the solar system, trashes the scientific method. Give him a Nobel eh? John Cook still doesn’t appear to know about the most relevant surveys in his chosen field.
This week, the American National Center for Science Education gave Mr Cook its annual Friend of the Planet award, for outstanding work to advance the centre’s goals.
Evidently the centre’s goals include teaching kids that science is a form of opinion polling. Nah — who am I kidding, the primary goal is training kids to pay their science tax, to salute officials in lab coats, and prostrate themselves before Big-Gov, which after all, controls the weather. Whatever else happens at schools, children must never ever question Big-Government Science. (That might lead them to question big-government grants!).
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Lets unpack the mythical myth-busting
John Cook starts with a myth that isn’t a myth, and which isn’t science either:
MYTH BUSTED: There’s no scientific consensus on climate change
Despite getting a full time salary at UQ, Cook-the-consensus expert hasn’t done his reading and doesn’t know that almost half of meteorologists are skeptics, two-thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics, and most readers of skeptical blogs (see the comments) have hard science degrees. The number of hard science degrees in the world would outnumber the number of “climate scientists” 100 to 1, or maybe a thousand to one. Ergo, the scientific world at large is skeptical of the small group in the new immature, unproven branchlet called “climate science” which so far hasn’t produced a moon shot, built any planes, or eradicated small pox. Climate science collectively fails to predict droughts, El Ninos, and barbeque summers, and fails to do it all over the world.
Cook qualifies the grandiose false statement in his next sentence. But he never corrects the headline message, indeed his whole career is built on the misunderstanding that four score climate scientists are “The Scientific Community” and represent a scientific consensus.
“The reality is that there’s 97 per cent agreement among climate scientists that human are causing global warming.
Does accuracy matter? Only as long as John can keep repeating misinformation most of the time.
But he hints that he is aware that scientists exist. So what does he call the thousands of science trained people who find minerals, build bridges and cure diseases — they’re “fake experts”:
The technique that is often used to cast doubt on this figure is to use fake experts, use people who have the impression of scientific expertise but don’t actually publish peer-reviewed research.
Methinks the best definition of a false expert is a psychologist telling us that he knows how much the world will warm because he’s done an opinion poll but never published a climate science paper.
The real fake expert is a man calling himself a science communicator when he doesn’t know what science is. Scientists don’t vote on the laws of physics. It’s about observations, Mr Cook. UPDATED: And speaking of observations, that 97% study he did, which he tried to hide the data for, only shows a 0.3% consensus if we assess the abstracts by the definitions Cook set. Richard Tol took it and ERL apart.
“the Cook et al paper used an unrepresentative sample, can’t be replicated, and leaves out many useful papers. The study was done by biased observers who disagreed with each other a third of the time, and disagree with the authors of those papers nearly two-thirds of the time. About 75% of the papers in the study were irrelevant in the first place, with nothing to say about the subject matter. Technically, we could call them “padding”. Cook himself has admitted data quality is low. “
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MYTH BUSTED: Climate has changed in the past. What’s happening now must be natural as well
Cook uses a strawman fallacy to pretend there is a non-sequitur. The fake expert uses a fake fallacy…
This argument uses a logical fallacy known as a non sequitur, or jumping to conclusions.
“Just imagine if you walked into a room and you found a dead body with a knife sticking out of it’s back and you argued ‘well, humans have been dying of natural natural causes for thousands of years, so therefore, this person must have died of natural causes as well.’
Except that the leading skeptics don’t say that. They point to the millions of years when it’s been hotter, wetter, colder and higher in CO2 to show that the correlation is pathetic and only a Dunderhead C-grade Scientitwit would pretend that CO2 drove the climate when there are millions of counter examples to show the theory was wrong.
The main limpid thrust of Climate Scientists Inc is to declare that nothing else could have caused the latest warming. Yet their climate models can’t explain any of the other past warm blips that are a lot like this one.
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MYTH BUSTED: The sun is causing global warming
“But the fact here is that over the last 30 years of global warming, sun and climate have been going in opposite directions.
The Sun couldn’t possibly change temperatures on Earth through changes in the solar wind, the spectrum or the magnetic field. And yet, with an 11 year delay there is this odd correlation for the last 200 years. Meh. Must be nothing.
One day when climate scientists realize that the sun is more than just a ball of light, they will add other solar factors to their models, and years after that they might have models that can predict something.
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MYTH BUSTED: Global warming stopped about two decades ago
“The fact here is that over the last few decades our planet has been building up heat at a rate of four atomic bombs per second.
“They’ll just cherry-pick small periods of a temperature record and say ‘hey look, over a very small period, temperature isn’t going up very much’ but it’s ignoring the bigger picture and it’s ignoring looking at our climate system as a whole, all the heat building up in our system.”
Cook”debunks” the myth with a lame red-herring, and converts pathetically small degrees Celsius into an irrelevant big scary number of joules. Suddenly global warming is global jouling — should we pay billions to stop these extra joules? Given that the sun is dumping 500 times as many atomic bombs on us every second — maybe not. A real scientist might wonder if we can even measure this tiny sliver of “extra joules”. We have one thermometer per 250,000 cubic kilometers of ocean and we’re looking for changes of a hundreth of a degree. Dear John, the error bars laugh at your 4 atomic bombs and The Sun just blows them away.)
…
To sum up myth 4, Cook resorts to a non-sequiteur, cherrypicked factoid that is a red herring, inconsequential, and probably doesn’t exist.
Those who can’t explain the pause, can’t explain the cause*.
Poor Jorge Branco, writer at the Sydney Morning Herald wasn’t trained to ask hard questions, didn’t do any research and produced exactly the kind of journalism we’ve come to expect from Fairfax — gullible soaking agitprop. Yawn.
A study done on… golly, Antarctic Ice, allegedly shows that in the catchment area for Newcastle in NSW, Australia, the last 100 years have been pretty darn nice, compared to the past when droughts and big-wet periods used to last a lot longer.
Set aside, for a moment, that the ice cores are thousands of kilometers away and in a totally different climate, if they are right, if, then natural climate change is much worse than our short climate records are telling us. And if our current records are so inadequate and don’t represent the “old-Normal”, then we have a flying pigs of predicting the “New Normal”. Has the climate changed at all, or is the new one just like the old old one?
“The study showed that modern climate records, which are available for the past one hundred years at best, do not capture the full range of rainfall variability that has occurred,” Dr Tozer said.
“The wet and dry periods experienced since 1900 have been relatively mild when we look at the climate extremes of the past millennium.”
“Looking back over the past thousand years, we see that prolonged wet periods and droughts of five years or longer are a regular feature of the climate.”
The press release and interview can tell us that we are “underestimating” the risk of drought and flood, which sounds like the usual “worse than expected” scare story beat up in the media — but it is different. This time we are underestimating the risk of natural causes of floods and droughts:
“Water resources infrastructure in Australia is still mostly designed based on statistics calculated from about the last 100 years of instrumental rainfall and streamflow observations,” Dr Kiem said.
“What this study shows is that existing water management plans likely underestimate the true risk of drought and flood due to the reliance on data and statistics obtained from only the relatively short instrumental period.”
The ABC and The Conversation don’t draw the bleeding obvious next step: If follows — as day after night, that if we’ve underestimated natural climate change — then the models have been overestimating the influence of CO2.
There is no mention of climate change in the ABC interview. None on The Conversation either. You might feel relieved that these stories didn’t beat us over the head with the usual doctrine: “climate change will be worse than we thought, spend more money, buy a windmill”. But they should have mentioned climate change. They should have connected the dots for what this means — the climate is likely to get more extreme in future, but it’s less likely that “carbon dioxide” is the cause. They certainly wouldn’t have hesitated if the study suggested that 20th century was “unprecedented”, or “hotter”, “wetter” or “drier” than the last thousand years.
Is Force X two different forces? The Sun could influence Earths climate through magnetic fields, solar particle flows, or spectral changes. | Image: ESA
There are two key clues, almost contradicting each other, which we must solve to figure out what Force X is.
How do we explain that mysterious pattern — the little spike of extra sunlight each sunspot cycle doesn’t warm the Earth as it arrives — and it should. Instead, the warming appears greatly amplified 11 years later (or one sunspot cycle later). What’s going on? Logically the sunlight itself is not the direct cause, but only a signal, a leading indicator of something else going on — perhaps the solar wind, the magnetic fluxes, or the changes in the UV-Infra Red spectrum. Any one of these (or all of them) or maddeningly, even something else, could be influencing cloud cover on Earth — and some action on clouds is by far the most likely mechanism to amplify the solar effect. They blanket 60% of Earth, and small changes make large differences. We live on a Water-Planet.
So having looked at the reasons for Force X, we now split it into two different forces (N and D) to see if that fits the evidence better (I think it does). Perhaps the spectral changes cause the delay, but something about the magnetic flux causes the notching effect (where the energy spikes in extra sunlight seem to disappear). If there are two forces at work Force X won’t cut it. We need Force D and Force N. The timing of one force (X) is messy — at the peak of a cycle we are notching away the current spike, but amplifying the spike found in the cycle before? Instead there is a simplicity about saying that the notching force is immediate, but different to the delayed force. It’s even possible that they both act through clouds, but they could be acting on different kinds of clouds (or through different altitudes or latitudes). David calculates that to “notch” out the extra sunlight would only take an increase in clouds of 0.05%. It’s too small to detect.
As usual, electrical engineers will be most at home with David’s analysis. Force D works like a low pass filter and notching occurs in every Western electrical system, both of which are bread and butter stuff for electrical engineers. Come with us on another step towards figuring out the system… — Jo
In this post we consider an alternative hypothesis to the force X hypothesis of the last post. Let’s entertain the idea of two indirect warming influences: “force N” causes notching, while “force D” explains the delay, the indirect solar sensitivity (ISS), and the externally-driven albedo (EDA) finding.
Discussion
The force X hypothesis is based on the assumption that the four strong influences listed near the beginning of the last post are all manifestations of the same influence, namely force X. There are (at least) two possible drawbacks to this.
The first is that the cloudiness fraction, available from 1983, shows no peaking during the TSI peaks of 1990 and 2001, and if anything shows a decrease in cloud fraction around 2001. Low-altitude cloud cover underwent a distinct trough around 1990, but there was no particular feature in 2001 (Fig. 2-12 of Lockwood et. al.’s Earthshine Mission case from 2004, and Climate and Clouds). But force X acts by albedo modulation and produces a cooling peak to counteract the TSI peak at the sunspot maxima, suggesting it creates an increase in cloud cover around sunspot maxima.
Christopher Monckton reminds us of just how badly the “experts” have failed in the last 15 years, even including the recent hottest ever El Nino months. China bombed the atmosphere with record carbon “pollution” — worse than we thought. The world though, warms sedately at a mere half a degree per century. This is what 95% certainty looks like. — Jo
Introducing the global warming speedometer
A single devastating graph shows climate panic was unfounded
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
A single devastating graph – the new global warming speedometer – shows just how badly the model-based predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have failed.
While Turnbull and the Liberals are attacking Labor for wanting a “massive new carbon tax on electricity,” it turns out that the Climate Change Authority is going to recommend the Liberals do exactly that but not ’til after the election. Allegedly Greg Hunt’s office are “very happy” that the report will be delayed. It would muddy up that scare campaign about Labor’s carbon tax if the punters knew the Libs planned to bring one in too. Labor and the Greens are crying foul, saying the report should be released now.
We are bizarrely reliving 2009. The public don’t want carbon trading. They have voted against it at every opportunity. They don’t want to spend even $2 to neutralize flights, yet both major political parties are now demanding we have one. If the report is suppressed in any way it shows Turnbull and Hunt know the public don’t want a carbon tax, but they’re going to give them one despite that.
The Climate Change Authority was rescued from the Abbott sabre by Al Gore and Clive Palmer. Turnbull and Hunt pointed at it on Sept 22 last year, barely two weeks after the coup, and announced carbon trading and a “cap” could begin in mid 2016. Neither of them have said anything since that suggests they are not intending to bring Cap N Trade in after the election.
Yet again, the climate non-issue for voters is causing turmoil in the Liberal Party. Turnbull is cutting out the core traditional Liberal supporters — and for seemingly no electoral gain. The Delcon / Defcons are furious. I predicted a Turnbull PM would be the seed to split the Liberal party. Maurice Newman warned the same thing and repeated it again recently. Will Turnbull offer any guarantee he will not bring in Cap N Trade in any form?
A report that recommends putting a price on emissions from the electricity sector has been held back by the Climate Change Authority until after the election, prompting calls from Labor and the Greens that it be made public to inform debate.
The independent authority, whose board is now dominated by appointments made last October by Environment Minister Greg Hunt, was to have released its policy options paper for the power industry by the end of April.
The board, though, decided to withhold the report – along with the large Special Review due out by June 30 – until after the election, “assuming it is called for early July,” the authority said on its website.
While Mr Hunt and his department did not intervene, his office was “very happy” that the electricity sector report’s release was delayed, another source said.
A spokesman for Mr Hunt said his office had not seen the reports. He also dismissed the possibility that the government would have withheld a report favouring a wide-ranging carbon price on the eve of an election.
The CCA electricity report assessed the relative merits of different schemes, and found the emissions-intensive version (see “EI” in the following chart from the report) favoured by Labor to be among the cheaper options.
Labor Greens seem oblivious to how little the public want to pay for “climate change”. The Liberal Party seem oblivious that over half the Australian population are skeptical.
Tony Abbott’s plan is one of the most efficient and effective programs anywhere in the world. But the Green hero is really enemy number one. Apparently giving the eco-cartel what they say they want is a disaster. Don’t look now, but green underpants are showing. Who cares about carbon reduction or trees? Givem’ power and money!
Gillard’s carbon tax cost $5310 per ton. Abbott’s plan at $10/ton this round is 531 times greener. The Direct Action plan uses a reverse auction to buy the cheapest carbon reduction in Australia. In the third round another half billion dollars has bought 47m tons of carbon reduction at an even cheaper price than the first two rounds. Most it achieved by planting or restoring greenery and trees.
The real problem with the Direct Action plan is manifold — a/ it doesn’t specifically punish the “big polluders” (those big independent companies that don’t need the government to survive). b/ it doesn’t reward the right patrons — there’s no money for the parasitic windmills and solar industries. And c/ It is more like the real free market solution the eco-fans say they want — showing that the fake free market idea of imposing an economy-wide carbon trading scheme is useless, overpriced, and inefficient. Direct Action fails to reward those financial houses and the conglomerate big-gov entities like the EU and UN, all of whom have been part of the lobbying cheer-squad for 20 years.
I’ve said before that the man-made climate-faith is a luxury of the stupidly wealthy. Only people with time to stress about the carbon footprint of their oranges can wallow in the indulgence of owning the idea that windmills in Alabama could reduce tidal surges in Peru. It follows then that if (or as) the economy falls apart so will the Green religion.
A new research paper backs this up, but possibly shows more about researcher’s confirmation bias than it does about the public. (I suspect the most useful part of this research was that a couple of hundred people got to see a video with Richard Lindzen in.)
That the global-eco-faith needs lots of wealth is a horrible conundrum for the Greens. The best thing they can do to encourage “climate belief” is to get out of the way and let the economy prosper, which of course is the last thing the Greens can do since “Growth” = “Pollution” in the GreenWorldView. So the more the Greens do to slow or wreck the economy, the more skeptical the population will get. It’s a “positive” feedback loop that may protect Western Civilization a little bit. Joy.
Is that motivated recall or motivated analysis?
The researchers report on “motivated recall” but use some pretty “motivated analysis” to misunderstand their data.
“A mediation analysis suggested that the tendency for conservatives to be more skeptical of climate change is consistent with a stronger motivation to justify the economic system.
I’ll translate that for them:
A mediation analysis suggested that the tendency for progressives to be more gullible about climate change is consistent with a stronger motivation to justify their anti-capitalist economic system.
To their credit, the paper does mention something on these lines — the researchers admit that they hadn’t been looking for it, but, golly, their results raise the possibility that the anti-capitalists “may possess an opposing motivation”…. and “nonconsiously exaggerate”. No kidding. The Carbon Wolf will eat the Penguin King, drown whole Cities, and unleash the God of War?
Given the historic rank failure of anti-capitalist economies, it’s only fitting that those who lean toward communism might also lean towards the Doctrine of the evil Carbon Wolf. (That’s the unlikely faith that humans can control the climate despite us making only 4% of a trace gas that is not even the dominant greenhouse gas, and the almost total lack of evidence or predictive association between CO2 and long term climate change.)
To create enviro-panic, suppress econo-panic
Their final conclusion is a typical postmodernist one advising that to “overcome public resistance to pro-environmental policies” the communicator ought to tell people how healthy the economy is at the same time as telling them how bad the environment is:
Got moral decay? High Priestess Naomi Klein, expert psychoanalyst, says blame the weather. John Vidal, writer for The Guardian, believes her:
“It is not about things getting hotter and wetter but things getting meaner and uglier, unless we change the corrosive values that are pitting people against each other,”…
See, some people think mums and dads are supposed to teach values, but really it’s a humidity thing.
(Obviously, the way to fight racism is with biogas.
…and maybe ethanol.)
Naomi’s thesis reminds us that when the weather was ideal — like in 1915, there were no wars and everyone liked everyone.
She urged people to make the links between climate change and conflict. “Anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change. And climate change people rarely talk about war. Overcoming these disconnections is the most pressing task for anyone occupied with social justice.
Yes, stop ISIS now — send in the windmills!
“There is no clean, safe way to run an economy built on fossil fuels. There is no peaceful way to do it…
Because seven billion people would be at peace if they used horses, carts, ate bark and razed the tropics for the firewood.
“We are running out of cheap ways to get to fossil fuels. This sees the rise of fracking which is now threatening some of the prettiest places in Britain.”
Soon frakking may ruin the rocks under Lancashire.
What we really need is colder weather. It made Napolean a lot nicer.
“Fossil fuels, which are the principal driver of climate change, require the sacrifice of whole regions and people. Sacrificial zones like the Niger delta and the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, dot the world.
If we could only pave Niger with solar panels we could spare the Niger delta.
“These zones require the shredding of treaties that enable peoples to live on their land. Indigenous rights are meaningless when the land is being [destroyed] and the rivers are polluted. Resource extraction is a form of violence because it does so much damage and kills cultures,” she said.
Paleolithic people ate treaties for breakfast and burned indigenous rights to keep warm. The violence of resource extraction destroyed the Bronze Age culture and brought the horrors of ballet.
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