For all those other topics….
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 Naomi Klein Photo: Mariusz Kubik Naomi Klein was the wrong person to send to a heavy-weight science conference — in “Capitalism vs Climate” she notices hundreds of details, but they’re all the wrong ones. Naomi can tell you the colour of the speakers hair, what row they sat in, and the expression on their face — it adds such an authentic flavor to the words, but she’s blind to the details that count. She can explain the atmosphere of the room, but not the atmosphere of the Earth. One of these things matters, and Klein has picked the wrong one. Her long attack on the Heartland ICCC conference this year is all color and style, and nothing of consequence — the lights are on and no brain is home. Unpack the loquacious pencraft and we wallow in innumerate arguments that confuse cause and effect, peppered with petulant name-calling. She can throw stones, but she can’t count past “one”. Her aversion to numbers is cripplingConsider how she reduces planetary dynamics to a Yes or No answer. She thinks each skeptical scientist contradicts the next: “Is there no warming, or is there warming but it’s not a problem? And if there is no warming, then what’s all this talk about sunspots causing temperatures to rise?” But oops, Naomi, the numbers matter, numbers like how much warming, and how many years are we talking about. Is the planet warming? Well, since when, Naomi, since when? You might only be able to answer “Yes”, because that’s the ritual litany you’ve been trained to say, but independent scientists talk about whether it’s cooled in the last 10 years, warmed for the last 300 and changed since William the Conqueror. When it comes to the warming in the last century, is it by 0.7 C or is it really 0.5? This is where the scientists at the Heartland conference were at. Like a color-blind art critic, it’s as if any number bigger than zero or one went right over her head. Her thesis sinks quickly to a parody of intellectual wit. Naomi thinks she can understand planetary radiative physics with psychoanalysis. (Essentially she knows she’s right because those who disagree vote the wrong way too).
Unwittingly she’s admitting that she picks her scientific theories according to her political aims. She makes the child-like assumption that everyone else “thinks” the same flawed way she doesShe believes those who disagree with her on the science do it because they vote differently — completely missing the obvious truth that a slab of the population can do what she can’t: that is, think. She’s got cause and effect completely back to front. It’s not that skeptics pick their political masters, then “follow” the party line — they pick the theory and then find the right party. Klein apparently can’t imagine doing something as radical as looking at the evidence first, then picking the politicians who don’t seem to be barking mad, gullible patsies, fawning to the latest tax-mongering fallacy. It’s frankly a bland non-event that at the moment independent -thinkers lean heavily Republican. Which Democrat can see through the scam?  Pew Poll: The turning point for Republican voters was in 2008. [Source: http://www.people-press.org/2009/10/22/fewer-americans-see-solid-evidence-of-global-warming/ Klein’s denial of realityBad manners always say more about the speaker than the target. Klein deceives herself with her name-calling “denier”. She can’t name anything scientific that the so-called deniers deny. Instead she fell for the Richard Muller blatant fakery, where he pretended to be a skeptic, then was so conveniently converted. She’s the one denying that he was always a fan of the IPCC, and always thought CO2 was pollution. The myth that Big-Oil drives the skeptics is manna for the confused, who can’t fathom why so many people don’t pander to the same messianic saviours that they do. Klein obediently totes out the “$900 billion” the top five oil corporates make in profits, but completely ignores the $10 Trillion market in carbon credits that a global trade could have produced. Again, the numbers are just too complex for her — Exxon and friends might lose 5 or 10% of their bottom line to the monster carbon market, but the carbon market fans lose 100% of their profits if the big scare is exposed as a fake. There’s ten times the money pushing for a carbon market, and Klein blindly acts as a sock puppet for the big financiers. The scientists speaking at Heartlands Climate Conference were so far ahead of Klein, they might as well have been speaking Urdu. The logical vacuum sucksThe entire 9600 word tome depends on one sole point: the evidence that doubling CO2 causes major warming, not just 0.5 degrees, but 3.5 degrees. (There are those problematic numbers again). Klein starts from the assumption that the way to know if the third rock from the sun is artificially warming is to parrot government scientists — hailing “Gods” appointed by the politicians. Thus everything she writes, collapses from the start. Science is not about following government appointed prophets, but about the evidence, the measurements, and the observations. The weather balloons, satellites, ocean buoys and ice cores are unanimous — the modelers-of-doom are exaggerating. Klein never goes there. Her religion doesn’t permit it, and she’d have to deal with … numbers. When Pat Michaels suggested that airconditioners would save people from heat stroke in France, Klein called it “callous”. Why? Apparently people are dying in Africa, in droughts, and Naomi thinks that airconditioners in France are causing it. Somehow it’s reasonable for the French to die of heat-stroke on the off-chance that by switching off the air-con they might create some rain in Johannesburg. Global dumbness is scary. How could reasonable people believe this? Keep reading → November 12th, 2011 | Tags: Heartland Institute, Innumerate, Klein (Naomi) | Category: Global Warming, Logic & Reason |  Print This Post | | Pew Charitable Trusts is an influential “progressive” think-tank with $5 billion in assets. What was the The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has lost the Pew name and funds, and become the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES). Pew used to supply $3.5 million of the center’s current $4.4 million annual budget. Instead, in complete green purity, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Entergy Corp. will be the principal founding sponsors for the new C2ES. DeSmog immediately denounced them and declared that all of their pronouncements are automatically biased since they are now oil-funded deniers: …Or maybe not. If Shell had sponsored a skeptic, Desmog would have turned it into a high rotation ritual chant. Keep reading → And so it came to pass that a small band of the selfish or deluded came to steal the blood, sweat and toil of the many. They lied, broke solemn promises, failed to provide evidence, and displayed a singular lack of good-manners. They viciously insulted anyone who disagreed, they hid the models the public were forced to pay for, they gave patrons highly paid jobs to advertize their scheme. They speak arrant nonsense as if it is the bleeding obvious: telling us that we will grow rich if we use energy that costs more; that coal miners are to blame for heavy rain; that more taxes will bring investors; that we’ll lose jobs if we don’t pay more than we need to for energy; or that 6.98 billion people will follow the 0.02 billion who lead us on the path to the Land of Stupid. They made prophesies that failed time after time, yet speak on, as if only they have the vision to guide us. The polls show the public would not have elected people who wanted to bring in a Carbon Tax. Yet it is law.
The narcissistic self-anointed activists have overreached, and it will be their undoing. “We’re copying the EU” except the EU took $1.50 per capita over 5 years, and we’re taking 250 times as much. The selfish include the parasitic members of the species homo-sapiens — they who produce little of value, but demand the rest provide them with food, housing and rewards. These demands are enacted through the government, under the guise of “helping” to prevent a non-existent threat. The deluded include many people of good will, who are too busy (working to support the parasitic class) to check that their news sources, schools, and government officials are giving them both sides of the story, or that their search engines are behaving fairly (who would know?). People can simultaneously belong to both groups. Some of the parasitic class, deceive themselves that they are helping. They take no responsibility for the children who drowned in floods they said would never come. They will never know, nor apologize to those who die prematurely of diseases that could have been cured. They think not of all the invisible jobs that were gone before they were offered, or the factories that moved overseas. Australians, Bob Brown just knocked on your door and demanded your house pay somewhere from $390 up to $1,000 per person each year (depending on your model) from July 1, 2012, for ever. For this money, you will receive in return a change in the climate too small to measure. If you don’t pay, you will be incarcerated. You no longer have the opportunity to spend that $1,600 – $4,000 per household each year on things that are more important to you. Money that could have been used to teach our children, or cure diseases, or give clean water to the poor will now be used to employ people to audit, market, and manage schemes that enrich bankers and traders and feed the mafiosi. If that makes you angry, there is plenty you can do. We don’t have to accept this, but it will take work. All around the world the vacuity and self serving nature of this false alarm is spreading by word of mouth. Photos of thermometers in car-parks, and cartoons or charts of rivers of money, are spreading from intray to intray. The flow of believers becoming skeptics is one way and cumulative, and the tipping point is near when it will be open knowledge that the great CO2 scare amounts to nothing. You too, can send a letter to the editor of every major newspaper.Bob Brown wants you too: “Feel like your Government is not listening to your concerns?” he asks… “Then use our letter writing facility “. The Greens helpfully provide us with a page to write to the editors of all the national newspapers. I recommend you use it. Politely. The financial day of reckoning (think Greece, think the Eurozone) will hasten the process of putting the climate scare in its place. Labor will live to rue the day it fell for the most blatant of scams. It will be marked for a generation as the gullible patsies of global financial houses. Thank the Greens and Julia Gillard for waking up the citizens, for they could have kept growing their power through stealth and calculation, but instead they’ve bet double or nothing on one card which turned out to be The Joker. They are one cutting documentary, or one scathing feature film away from going down in history as the sock-puppets of banksters who thought they could change the weather. Who is cheering today as the legislation goes through? Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays,…. The Greens are unwittingly acting as agents for large financial institutions who want monster profits from a trading scheme of paper credits in an atmospheric nullity. (Yes, I too, was once a Green who believed in man-made global warming .) Last year, $142 billion turned over in global carbon trading markets, and …the climate kept changing.
The Nation can never be compensated. Send a letter to National Editors and vote in the SMH poll. But yes, there is hope. Abbott has vowed to repeal it, and most of the rest of the world is abandoning it. The IPA and Ian Plimer are calling for donations. http://donate.ipa.org.au/
November 9th, 2011 | Tags: Carbon Tax | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming | Print This Post | | This is about what it adds up too: If the carbon tax costs us, say, $10 billion a year (anyone have a better number?) we not only have to pay that, but we might lose another $20 billion a year as well. As I’ve said before, you can’t compensate the nation. There is no productivity gain, no win, no efficiency improvement. There is no bigger pie if you have to cook with leather. Treasury likes to pretend that the rest of the world is “joining” in the carbon schemes, and that by 2016, the US, Canada, Japan, Russia, China and India will have changed their minds and legislated a carbon price. The Minerals Council of Australia wasn’t convinced that was a good plan, and asked the Centre of International Economics to analyze the Treasury modelling on the carbon price. The Treasury wouldn’t let them. (Who do they think owns the models?) Instead the CEI had to do their own modelling. They are apparently the first to try to figure out what might happen in Australia if the rest of the world doesn’t leap head-first and suicidally into carbon pricing schemes. The CIE finds losses that are 6 times greater:
The good news just keeps on coming: Keep reading → November 8th, 2011 | Tags: Carbon Tax, Minerals Council of Australia | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Australia will — bar asteroid impact — get its Carbon Tax on Tuesday. Otherwise, it’s business as usual in skeptic-world: Wild unheard-of snow started falling early in the US; there’s another story about masses of fossil fuel energy somewhere under Australia, another western nation makes it stark raving clear that it won’t be getting an ETS (Yay for Canada eh), while a different one pulls the pin on solar panel subsidies (Go Britain). The G20 leaders give Julia Gillard the deadly “you are so incredibly brave” speech, and said they aren’t going to follow. “PM Julia Gillard told by G20: you’re on your own on carbon” Keep reading → Kudos to John O’Sullivan for finding this story; see the note at the end about the extraordinary response his post on this received. ———————————- Who are the world’s worst “polluters”? According to a new high-spectral-resolution Japanese satellite — it’s developing countries.Who knew detailed spectroscopic data on Earth’s atmosphere was available to figure out where the CO2 and other greenhouse gases are being produced and absorbed? In January 2009, a Japanese group launched a satellite “IBUKI” to monitor CO2 and methane spectral bands around the world to establish exactly where the world’s biggest sources and sinks of greenhouse gases were. With climate change being the perilous threat to millions, this data would seem so essential you might wonder why didn’t someone do it before. As it happens, NASA tried — it launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory in Feb 2009, which was designed to do exactly the same thing, but it crashed on launch. Oddly, NASA don’t seem to be prioritizing the deadly climate threat, as it will take NASA four years to figure out why the Taurus XL rocket failed and relaunch it. The results from from Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) show that Industrialized nations appear to be absorbing the carbon dioxide emissions from the Third World. (Can we get carbon credits for that?) The satellite shows that levels of CO2 are typically lower in developed countries than in air over developing countries.  CO2 sources and sinks, recorded by satellite. (Red dots indicate higher levels of CO2, Blue dots mean CO2 levels are lower than average). Official figure caption: Carbon dioxide column averaged dry air mole fractions (XCO2) for clear-sky scenes analyzed using observations at shortwave infrared bands (radiance spectrum uncalibrated data) from the IBUKI greenhouse gas observation sensor (TANSO-FTS). Clear-sky scenes at individual TANSO-FTS observation points are determined using measurements from the cloud/aerosol sensor (TANSO-CAI). Data are excluded where the associated radiance spectra are saturated, and where noise is relatively large due to weak ground surface reflection. If the evil modern polluters were producing more CO2 (and it mattered to the global flux), then we’d see higher levels of CO2 (more red dots) over the first world. Right? But CO2 levels are lower than average (see the blue dots). The highest emissions, at least on this graph are predominantly in China, and central Africa.) Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the US midwest earn Gold Star environment awards for their low carbon dioxide levels. Keep reading → November 3rd, 2011 | Tags: CO2 emissions, Emissions (CO2) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Another notch on the winners tally board. It’s a mark of the times that one of the most popular, well known and respected science commentators is willing to to put his reputation and effort into laying out such controversial science publicly, pulling no punches and in a potentially hostile environment. Compare this to the obituaries of “global warming” from believers. Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, spoke at an event by the RSA* in Edinburgh. Emails are coming in — it has hit a nerve — and it’s insightful to watch Matt stand in enemy territory, carefully finding common ground with the real scientists in the audience, the seekers of truth, before he launches his attack on the consensus position. According to Bishop Hill (aka Andrew Montford) the speech was well received. I’ve selected key paragraphs, though ended up with a 2,400 word version. The full 4,000 word version is on Bishop Hill. David* and I were fortunate enough to have a private lunch with Matt Ridley on his Australian tour, and it was a delight. Days like that are one of rewards for the hours of work unpaid. I usually don’t mention these kind of events — name-dropping is fun — but in this loaded underworld, opponents of the establishment are demonized so it’s usually a disadvantage to the other parties, and I keep a low profile. Such are the medieval rites and rules about being a heretic in our modern era. At the time Matt expressed some concern about what happens to writers who speak about their skepticism, and I thought it wiser not to publicly mention that he had “consorted” with the despised deniers such as David and myself. Perhaps he was checking that climate skepticism made sense, perhaps that it’s advocates were sane, rational, and presentable in polite company. Anyway, it now appears that there can be no doubt about his position on the topic. What makes this so worth reading is how well crafted his sequence of reasoning is, and how much research he has done to put this together. In unsensational considered tones, he explains what science is, and how the ever-present temptation of confirmation bias can easily convert scientists to the path of pseudoscience. It’s packed with wisdom, which is why, I guess, I started off meaning to select a few key quotes, and ended up with 60% of his speech (apologies if I haven’t always done justice to the flow). Jo
————————————————————————————— My topic today is scientific heresy Matt Ridley Alchemy by James Gillray I have a soft spot for heresy. One of my ancestral relations, Nicholas Ridley* the Oxford martyr, was burned at the stake for heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience? Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience. Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience. Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience. … Now comes one that gave me an epiphany. Crop circles*. Keep reading →
BREAKING: Steven McIntyre reports that “649 Berkeley stations lack information on latitude and longitude, including 145 BOGUS stations. 453 stations lack not only latitude and longitude, but even a name. Many such stations are located in the country “[Missing]“, but a large fraction are located in “United States”. Steve says: “I’m pondering how one goes about calculating spatial autocorrelation between two BOGUS stations with unknown locations.” ——————————————————– The BEST media hit continues to pump-PR around the world. The Australian repeats the old-fake-news “Climate sceptic Muller won over by warming”. This o-so-manufactured media blitz shows how desperate and shameless the pro-scare team is in their sliding descent. There are no scientists switching from skeptical to alarmist, though thousands are switching the other way. The sad fact that so many news publications fell for the fakery, without doing a ten minute google, says something about the quality of our news. How is it headline material when someone who was never a skeptic pretends to be “converted” by a result that told us something we all knew anyway (o-look the world is warming)? The five points every skeptic needs to know about the BEST saga: 1. Muller was never a skepticHere he is in 2003: “carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history.” [kudos to Ethicalarms] And with Grist in 2008: “The bottom line is that there is a consensus and the president needs to know what the IPCC says”. 2. BEST broke basic text-book rules of statisticsThey statistically analyzed smoothed time series! Douglass Keenan quotes the guru’s “you never, ever, for no reason, under no threat, SMOOTH the series! ” (because smoothing injects noise into the data). BEST did, thus invalidating their results. 3. The BEST results are very “adjusted” and not the same as the original thermometer readingsThink hard about what we might have discovered in the 2000’s that meant thermometers in the 1970’s (but not the 1900’s) were accidentally recording “low temperatures”. How likely is it that raw thermometer readings all over the world, with a simple 300 year old technology, needed to be globally cooled or warmed a year at a time, and they seemed to be “out” for decades? The BEST team deny thousands of lying thermometers, news articles, reports of snowfalls and frosts in the 1970’s. Is reality better reflected in historical archives of news reports, and original readings, or through adjustments and reanalysis 40 years later? Hmmm. 4. Obviously hot air doesn’t rise off concreteBEST tells us that the Urban Heat Island effect is minor, and misplaced thermometers don’t make any difference to the run. Thus with statistics we can show that hot air does not rise off concrete, that brick walls do not store and emit heat at night, that airport tarmacs don’t make any difference to the temperature trends of the air nearby. BEST say that the trends are accurate. We agree completely. We accept continuous trend data from all the thermometers that were sited in airports back in 1850. 😉 We don’t need complex statistical rebuttals to put BEST back in it’s box. All we need to do is point at photos and say that BEST shows that these two thermometers are recording accurate trends compared to 150 years ago. Remember, we’re looking for evidence of a 0.7 degree rise, over a hundred years with thermometers similar to this. Repeat after me, these are good thermometers, they’re in the right place, we know that, because the BEST project says so:  1 Just another open level clearing with 30m clearance from sources of artificial heat. Right? (Photo courtesy of Anthony Watts, www.surfacestations.org and Don Kostuch. ) Keep reading → November 1st, 2011 | Tags: BEST project, Curry (Judith), Muller (Richard) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | A former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, wrote in May 2009 about how depressingly similar the US problems are to emerging economies he has worked with. It’s a provocative article: The Quiet Coup (a few excerpts posted here). “Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.” The Quiet Coup The problem is oligarchs who overborrow, become too powerful, and gain too much influence:
“Wall Street ran with these opportunities [lightweight regulation, cheap money, securitization, interest rate swaps, and I would add, high frequency trading]. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007. “The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight—a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man)… in the banking panic of 1907… The USA might be the most powerful economy on the planet, but the pattern is similar: “...inevitably, emerging-market oligarchs get carried away; they waste money and build massive business empires on a mountain of debt. “The downward spiral that follows is remarkably steep. Enormous companies teeter on the brink of default, and the local banks that have lent to them collapse. Yesterday’s “public-private partnerships” are relabeled “crony capitalism.” With credit unavailable, economic paralysis ensues, and conditions just get worse and worse. The government is forced to draw down its foreign-currency reserves to pay for imports, service debt, and cover private losses. But these reserves will eventually run out. If the country cannot right itself before that happens, it will default on its sovereign debt and become an economic pariah. The government, in its race to stop the bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national champions—now hemorrhaging cash—and usually restructure a banking system that’s gone badly out of balance. It will, in other words, need to squeeze at least some of its oligarchs. “Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government…
The thing that matters to the IMF — the most important point — is whether the government is willing to cut the oligarchs loose: Keep reading → Lucky the BEST* project is here to save us from the lying thermometers of the past. Apparently people in the 1960’s and 1970’s were clever enough to get man on the moon, but too stupid to measure the temperature. Millions of people were fooled into thinking the world was cooling for three decades by erroneous thermometer readings. Who would have guessed? Back then, everyone was sure that the 1970’s was a lot colder than the 1940’s, as Steven Goddard reminds us:  Newsweek April 1975 See the original Newsweek report at Denis Dutton‘s site. The Global Bermuda-Triangle Effect: Thermometer WeirdingThe performance of global thermometers is baffling. The technology is nearly 300 years old. The first thermometers were produced in 1724 by Daniel Fahrenheit, and by 1742 Anders Celsius had invented its main competitor. This simple, reliable instrument spread throughout the world and worked well. So far so good. But from 1920 we see the first signs of worldwide systematic errors (first too high, and then too low?!). The strange “Wierding” effect struck both mercury and alcohol thermometers and was most savage between 1945 and 1975. Frank Lansner compared the BEST projects result with his Rural Unadjusted Temperature Series (RUTI, below). The Berkley Earth Project (shown here in the dark green line) corrects for the inexplicable Wierding, and now reveals that the rural thermometers worldwide were systematically recording an astonishing half a degree too low! (Frankly, it’s a wonder that planes were able to land at country airports.)
 While rural raw temperatures fell, the BEST “reality” was that really it wasn’t that cold. See the RUTI analysis at Hide the Decline Scientists and journalists fooled Lowell Ponte, 1976 “Another Ice Age?” asked Time Magazine on June 24, 1975. It seems that many people were tricked into thinking the world was cooling, and saw the signs of it everywhere they looked. The mass delusion extended to imagining that growing seasons were shorter and to seeing fictitious extra snowfall in satellite photos. From Newsweek 1975, headlined “The Cooling World”: In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
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