In 1964 an earthquake made some parts of the Pacific into ponds on a few islands. Fifty years later and the fish in those ponds are now freshwater fish. Apparently the genes for dealing with that sort of wild extreme change are held by some of the fish in the crowd and natural selection can work its wonders in a decade.
In terms of ocean acidification, this is as catastrophic as it gets, not only did the ocean become “more acidic” but it stopped being an ocean.
It can’t get much worse than this for a fish, and yet somehow life on Earth had the answer.
What’s the pH of those ponds — The ocean pH is 8.1, rain is 5.5. Those ponds will be somewhere in between.
And some people think a man-made “ocean acidication” that’s smaller than this and slower, will devastate the ocean.
Evolution is usually thought of as occurring over long time periods, but it also can happen quickly. Consider a tiny fish whose transformation after the 1964 Alaskan earthquake was uncovered by University of Oregon scientists and their University of Alaska collaborators.
The fish, seawater-native threespine stickleback, in just decades experienced changes in both their genes and visible external traits such as eyes, shape, color, bone size and body armor when they adapted to survive in fresh water. The earthquake — 9.2 on the Richter scale and second highest ever recorded — caused geological uplift that captured marine fish in newly formed freshwater ponds on islands in Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska south of Anchorage.
Stickleback, the researchers concluded, have evolved as a species over the long haul with regions of their genomes alternatively honed for either freshwater or marine life.
And this is not just a plastic change, like becoming tan in the sun; the genome itself is being rapidly reshaped,” she said. “Stickleback fish can adapt on this time scale because the species as a whole has evolved, over millions of years, a genetic bag of tricks for invading and surviving in new freshwater habitats. This hidden genetic diversity is always waiting for its chance, in the sea.”
“In some of the populations that we studied we found evidence of changes in fewer than even 10 years. For the field, it indicates that evolutionary change can happen quickly, and this likely has been happening with other organisms as well.”
Wow. Just wow. Tony Thomas has uncovered the material the AAS provides to thousands of Australian teachers and students under the guise of science education resources.
As far as climate science goes, they might as well have hired Greenpeace. Mining is a questionable activity, Bob Brown is a hero, students should be lobbyists, and climate activists are champions. Forget the calculator, just whip out the placards. Science is not about evidence or thinking, but about following “reputable web sites” (which is code for “give me your brain and I’ll tell you what to think”). Coal is not so much a combustible mineral, as the number one “climate killer”. Not quite the dispassionate, logical path we used to think an Academy of Science might pursue.
“Ask students if they have ever taken action or advocated for a cause.” — AAS advice to teachers.
Or how about this:
Lesson outcomes: At the end of this activity students will … appreciate the need to lobby at all levels of government to ignite and lead change – even if it is unpopular with the voters.”
Because 15 year olds obviously know more than the voters, right?
But the young ones will be voters soon, and the Academy presumably wants to train them to vote the right way. The AAS is kind of union for scientists so it’s in their interest to get students to vote for bigger salaries, projects and grants for scientists.
“If you were concerned about Earth’s sustainability, who would you vote for?” — AAS
Watch the unspoken corollary: If you want to trash the planet, you’d vote for the other side.
The AAS have quietly become a political lobby group, so it’s a bit like letting the CFMEU* write school coursework on social history for teens. Worse, it’s like the government has given them a $9 million grant as well. The AAS describes mining not as a marvel of hominid enterprise, but as a controversial activity and “not a pretty site (sic)”. They even prompt the kids to ask:
Could we do without it?… Would you work for a mining company?
Mining companies are so beyond the pale these days that good people have to ask whether they would work for that sort of group. (Like a tobacco company — oh, the smell.) Can I suggest that the Minerals Council and AMEC, will find this interesting, and any large miners who sponsor or plan to leave bequests to the AAS might want to reconsider? (There are independent scientists who need your help and understand the value of mining.)
The thing that shocks me most about what Tony Thomas has found is not that the AAS has become a political activist group, and lost all sense of what the scientific method really is, but that this course has been running for two years and that science teachers have not protested. (And nor have academics). Where are the good science teachers, and can they get in touch? (Comment here or email joanne AT joannenova.com.au). Anonymity guaranteed if needed. Thanks…
The AAS is rationalizing these resources right now. They need to hear from real scientists.
— Jo (PS: For non Australians *CFMEU = Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.)
Under the hood on Science Academy’s climate schooling
By Tony Thomas
Jemima, aged 16, trudges home from high school.
Mum: “Have some Milo, darling. How’d that Australian Academy of Science assignment go?” Jemima: “Terrible! I flunked Advocacy and Campaigning in Searching for the Truth.”
“What? I thought you were doing monotremes!”
“Nah, I had to do a poster supporting action on climate change to share with the school, but my science teacher Mr Smith said it wasn’t emotive awareness-raising enough. Then he asked me, if I have ever taken action or advocated for a cause? I said no. And then he asked me if I know anyone who has? I said, yes, my Climate Champion is Bjorn Lomborg.”
“Jemima! You wicked creature! Want to get yourself suspended? What we pay for fees! Wait till your father blah blah…”
Links to the Academy’s school material need registration, so I’m using bold type for important quotes from the material.
The Reach of the Academy Courses
The Academy operates in schools alongside activist groups Greenpeace, Cool Australia, Oxfam Australia WWF, GetUp, Lock the Gate, you name it. But unlike those, the Academy’s on–line course Science by Doing (SBD), including the exhortations to activism, has been directly taxpayer-funded with about $9m from Labor and conservative federal governments[1]. SBD is a total secondary science course for Years 7-10, delivering the required curriculum, whereas the other external purveyors offer only supplementary material.
Since the SBD site went live in mid-2013, about 9300 secondary science teachers, or 37% of Australia’s 25,000 science teachers, have signed on for the free course, along with 50,000 students. Total registrations at last week were 62,300, despite little marketing – word of mouth among delighted science teachers is doing the job. Hits on the website were running at 2.7m in August. Growth of penetration into school is so high that the courses’ executive director Professor Denis Goodrum expects “market saturation during 2017”.
Source: Academy of Science
The Academy’s SBD and primary courses have flown under the public radar, because registration forms required school affiliation. Last month President Holmes[2] at a green conference in Hobart, invited the public to register and inspect[3]. Which I’ve done.
“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”
It’s a rare moment when I am on the same side as he is.
On the other hand, The Wall St Journal writes that it is watered down but will “transform” the economy:
If approved and implemented, the agreement would force businesses and citizens to sharply reduce their use of fossil fuels like oil, gas or coal and could fundamentally transform the global economy.
Both James Hansen and the Wall St Journal are right. The Paris agreement will achieve nothing for the environment, but transform the economy anyway.
“This is a good agreement,” Prakash Javadekar, India’s environment minister, said. “This means that all together will act to mitigate the challenge presented by climate change.” India is one of the key countries in the international negotiations.
From the deal itself. The global carbon market is voluntary. The words “must”, “requisite”, ” and “enforce’ are not used in the entire document and there is no mention of “decarbonize” either:
Article 6. 3. The use of internationally transferred mitigation outcomes to achieve nationally determined contributions under this Agreement shall be voluntary and authorized by participating Parties.
The exit clause (sing hallelujah)
Once this is signed, a country can get out four years later, perhaps a whole year before another big five-year-review pulls them back in.
Article 28
1. At any time after three years from the date on which this Agreement has entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from this Agreement by giving written notification to the Depositary.
COP21 won’t get a meaningful agreement, but they will get “breakthrough success”
Don’t think China, India and Russia can save us. They won’t give up fossil fuels in a meaningful way, but they all have a price and buying them off is a lot cheaper than you might think. That’s because the goal is not for them to reduce CO2, but only for them to give the appearance of doing so.
It’s not about CO2, but about PR
Paris is a theatre– a grand show, and China’s Vice Foreign Minister Liu Jianmin said as much. He “laughed when the ‘High Ambition Coalition’ was mentioned. “It is a kind of performance,” he said, “It makes no difference.”
The 1.5C “high ambition” target is a perfect PR win. The Green Machine will be able to claim a major success getting X number of countries to sign up for a breakthrough pledge to do something “more ambitious”, something that “far exceeded our hopes” but that is really decades away and likely to happen even if nobody did anything at all. It’s the do nothing, unaccountable promise that politicians love to make.
All three nations have publicly poured cold water on the Paris solutions, but view that as just posturing for a better position to negotiate from.
Figure how the equation looks for China:
how do I hobble my competitors, steal their factories, and sell them more of my goods?
how do I collect more of their pointless guilt payments (carbon credits etc)?
and how can I look like a hero in the West at the same time?
Answer to all three: smile at the press conference, and pander to the global extremists in words only. Do token efforts and turn the guilt screws on the West as appropriate.
Things for India don’t look that different to China. For Russia the equation is more complicated as it involves oil exports and ISIL. But all of them will sign a deal that hurts the West but doesn’t impinge on their own growth. And in China and Russia, there is no push-back from their citizens for “selling out”. We can’t rely on undemocratic countries to save us.
Why we know it’s a grand theatre
The Green Machine actions betray their words. When the Climate extremists get a choice they often choose the less effective and higher CO2 option — so there is something they want more than CO2 reductions, something that trumps mere “carbon pollution”. Ponder that Climate change is The Greatest Threat on Earth but the Green Machine won’t consider nuclear energy, super critical hot coal, fracking for gas, or Direct Action type plans that cut CO2 cheaply. As I said last week, Tony Abbott was dangerous because he gave the Green Machine what it “said” it wanted — cheap cuts to CO2. Really what they want is personal power, glory and money. They also like invitations to hot dinner parties and two week long junkets every year. Who wouldn’t? And getting that out of COP21 at Paris is a very different goal to reducing global atmospheric carbon dioxide or actually changing the temperature, which are both incidental, an accidental kind of collateral damage to achieve the primary goal. The top Green permitted solutions to the climate problems are always the ones that increase dependency on big-government — like inefficient renewable energy, government funded research, carbon taxes and fake markets that are government run.
Reducing actual emissions is unaffordable — but the reality of that won’t save us from a “true global deal” and a “major success” at COP21. The West can’t afford to pay to convert the developing world to renewables zero-emission heaven. The West can barely achieve real emission cuts for themselves. But what matters is getting India, China and Russia to look like they are doing something. That’s a PR victory for the Green Machine, and it would be used to keep dragging funding from western taxpayers.
PS: We’ll be getting back to original research and the notch and solar model soon after the Paris Show concludes.
PPS: We could really use your help in the tip jar. Thanks to our dedicated supporters. We can’t do this without you!
You will never guess. Not only does no one care if carbon credits don’t cut carbon emissions, but hardly anyone cares if so called climate money is even spent on the climate. As many as 66% of climate projects funded by the developed world have nothing to do with “climate vulnerability”.
It’s the bragging game — politicians want to make out they are doing a lot for the climate, but there’s barely any accountability to check whether they get value for money — by how many thousandths of a degree did that policy cool the world? So they inflate their spending promises by claiming random other projects are “climate projects” or they use accounting trickery.
University of Zurich’s Axel Michaelowa, who studies climate aid grants, found “there was a huge misrepresentation. Governments were actually really not able to report properly” on aid that was supposed to help countries reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
His study, conducted on specific climate grants four years ago, showed a list of “projects without any conceivable climate change connotation,” such as Belgium funding for a “love movie festival” in the early 2000s in Africa, a U.S.-funded study on Savannah elephant sounds, and uniforms for park guardians in Central America with aid from Spain.
Bravo for the full gloss, hi def, professional production, top editing, audio and camera work. It probably cost a motza, paid for by Climate Truth (formerly Forecast the Facts). So the side with lots of vested interests pumps the myth that the unfunded volunteer grassroots opponents are all funded by fossil fuels. (Projection anyone?) It’s the one and only cannon in their arsenal.
They use all the best intellectual weapons of the leftie toolkit: namecalling, bad manners and swearing.
If only it had a joke?
Like other attempts to be funny — the big-gov-pandering-fans-of-authority just can’t do political satire. (It’s by definition, really.) The video works as pap entertainment to keep believers from straying — it’ll help keep the Gullible Smug feeling smug. But on the rest of the population it will help skeptics more than hurt them. It takes a special kind of brainwashing to “know” droughts are worse and summers have never hit “ninety” degrees before. (Lordy!) But without any real surprises or ironic insights there are no gags for the mainstream audience. How funny is the line “fossil fuels are useful”? Laugh your socks off.
The full 2 hour 40 minute testimony of Ted Cruz and his invited guests.
Don’t underestimate the importance of what is going on in this testimony to Congress. It captures why the USA is the best hope for defeating the religious climate meme. Which other western democracy comes close to this? As Mark Steyn says, the most important form of competition is the competition of ideas. Paris will not get a binding agreement mostly because the USA congress stands in the way. (Though that doesn’t mean they won’t get billions; more on that in the next post.)
The landscape of the US presidential campaign has undergone a phase change. Watch this and think back to the bland weakness of Mitt Romney in 2012. In 2015 the top Republican candidates are competing to be the most skeptical, and to demonstrate how they don’t pander to political correctness. And Ted Cruz surely is the best informed on the climate topics.
Judith Curry ” I can no longer get government grants….”
Please copy your favorite quotes below so those who can’t watch the lot can pick up the gems.
UPDATE: Best short parts are around 2:14 – 2:20 with Steyn and Curry. A lot of the proceedings were dominated by the Democrats who turned up and outnumbered the Republicans. Only two Republicans were present. Cruz could’ve used more support. h/t Rodzki, TdeF at #13, #14, #15 for a good synopsis of the whole event.
h/t ianl8888, Alistair, Geoff D, Joe B, Pat, Yonnie.
A new seismic survey shows there is a blob of superheated rock 60 miles below West Antarctica. To describe it, the researchers use the phrase “like a blow-torch”. Of course, just because the parts of Antarctica that are warming are near or over this hot blob does not mean it’s causing the melting. It could be a coincidence. ; -)
… this is the first detailed look at the Earth beneath this region.
Not surprisingly, the maps show a giant blob of superheated rock about 60 miles beneath Mount Sidley, the last of a chain of volcanic mountains in Marie Byrd Land at one end of the transect. More surprisingly, they reveal hot rock beneath the Bentley Subglacial Trench, a deep basin at the other end of the transect.
The Bentley Subglacial Trench is part of the West Antarctic Rift System and hot rock beneath the region indicates that this part of the rift system was active quite recently.
The study really highlights how little we know about heat flow in Antarctica:
While heat flow through the Earth’s crust has been measured at at least 34,000 different spots around the globe, in Antarctica it has been measured in less than a dozen places. In July 2015, scientists reported the heat flow at one of these spots was four times higher than the global average.
Ever since then, scientists have been wondering why the reading was so high. “Recent extension in the Bentley Subglacial Trench might explain these readings,” Wiens said.
The IPCC says the West Antarctic is melting thanks to CO2.
Though they can’t explain why the rest of Antarctica doesn’t appear to be melting as well.
…
Naturally we don’t have any idea if the heat flows have gotten stronger lately since we didn’t know about the hot rocks before, and rather oddly, the volcanoes are going in the “wrong direction”:
When asked about paying for developing nations to adapt to climate change, the 1066 British people surveyed said they were willing to give an average of only £27 ($30US) a year. This is far below the UN gambit that hopes to take as much as $150 per head per year. But even that £27 figure is deceptively high. The real story is that the number was skewed up by a few people who were willing to pay a lot each. Nearly half the crowd didn’t want to give a cent. The median value was a paltry £6 per year. And this was in a test loaded with nice and authoritative messages about how useful those payments would be. Fully 45% of Brits surveyed did not want to contribute anything at all. (The figure is probably similar in the US, and people wonder why Trump is so popular?)
The question is about the public Willingness to Pay (WTP) and the answer is “negligible”:
Overall, taking all responses together, results show that respondents are willing to pay about £27 per year in income taxes to support adaptation efforts in developing countries. This is equivalent to $29.37, using purchasing power adjustments (World Bank 2014), significantly less than the back-of-the- envelope $100$150 per capita (based on the World Bank adaptation cost estimates discussed earlier). However, if we take the median WTP of £6 per year as our statistic of choice, with the understanding that support for developing country adaptation would depend on majority (at least 50%) support from the public, then it is clear that public support for developing adaptation is negligible.
The subtext of this survey is the finding that only 43% of UK people surveyed agree with the IPCC. Fifty-seven percent are skeptics. This fits reasonably well with a larger, and more neutral survey in the UK showing that 62% are skeptical of man-made climate change.
Figure 2. Personal belief about climate change (CC) (% respondents who chose statement). Total sample size D 1066.
Apparently the big problem was that 31% of Brits think climate change is mostly natural, which is something the researchers say is “wrong”:
Clearly, much needs to be done to motivate people to lend support to those who despite contributing relatively little to global carbon emissions – are likely to bear the brunt of climate change impacts. However, regression results on our data suggest that this will be no easy task. Together with ability to pay, WTP appears to be strongly driven by a combination of beliefs and individuals’ perception of their own knowledge levels, rather than actual knowledge of climate change or education levels. In particular, a belief that nature is the main cause of climate change appears to have a strong negative influence on the decision whether to contribute or not.
The researchers don’t know why the skeptics don’t want to pay, and essentially suggest, in the politest possible way, that they might be selfish, uncaring and immoral people. They wonder if skeptics rationalize their scroogelike behaviour by strategically adopting the belief that man-made warming is natural? What petty small minded people those skeptics would be… so unlike the noble researchers who speculate about complex sub-conscious mental defects in people they have no data on:
Interestingly, a belief in nature as the main cause of climate change (31% of the entire sample)
has a strong negative influence on participation overall. Perhaps, this suggests a fatalistic attitude of
those with such beliefs. Or perhaps the causality lies in the opposite direction: those who do not
wish to support adaptation projects for vulnerable others, justify their choices by explaining climate
change as natural phenomenon. This would suggest that, for these respondents, moral responsibility
for others is excused by the presence of some external factor (in this case, nature) over which the
respondent feels they have no control (Eshleman 2014). One might consider this a form of ‘strategic’
fatalism. Whatever the reason for this interesting result, however, the implication is clear: a belief
that climate change is caused by nature allows some people to absolve themselves of responsibility
towards those who will be negatively impacted by climate change.
The researchers do not suggest that skeptics don’t want to pay because they know the models are wrong, the scientists behave badly, and it’s quite likely that the world will cool instead, which rather mucks up those “adaption” plans. I guess they didn’t google “Climate skeptics” for ten minutes before they wrote their paper. (And nor did any of the “peer reviewers”.)
The researchers define “real knowledge” as agreeing with the consensus. How big is that confirmation bias?
In the years to come historians will note the remarkable role played by the Heartland Institute in the global scientific debate. Heartland didn’t start out to be a scientific group, but the NIPCC report is more comprehensive, balanced and will stand the test of time while the IPCC reports have already failed… And all done with a tiny budget compared to the billions squandered on mainstream universities.
Likewise Marc Morano, CFACT and Climate Depot. I never fail to be impressed with Marc’s professionalism and relentless good humour as he fends off the propaganda. Watch the schedule below for the World Premier of the Climate Hustle movie. I’m very much looking forward to seeing that!
See also Willie Soon, Bob Carter, James Taylor, Fred Singer, Christopher Essex, Jim Inhofe, Patrick Moore, Christopher Monckton, Tom Harris…
Kinda amazing to be in the room from so far. The playback can be replayed.
Bask in the hypocrisy — the concern about CO2 is faked
Climate change is The Greatest Threat on Earth but the Merchants of Panic don’t really care if we reduce CO2. Follow what they do, not what they say. This is our last chance to save the planet, but they won’t consider nuclear energy — apparently the planet is just not that important. Nor will they consider Ultra Super Critical hot burning coal, which could reduce emissions by 15% at a stroke. Likewise fracking. Instead, the answer to everything is always inefficient, government-dependent industries and trading schemes. These schemes don’t reduce much CO2, but they reward the patrons of big-government and punish the opponents. They suck money from independent corporations, and churn that cash through the “renewables” cheer-squad, the financial houses, and the groups that profit from keeping the climate scare going. Ponder that the EU had a monster emissions trading scheme, but the USA cut far more emissions — thanks to fracking and no thanks to any fake “free market”. The bottom line is that we may face the Anthropocene Mass Extinction Event, but apparently things are not so bad that the Greens will consider fracking. The big EU market was riddled with corruption for years, which caused more CO2 to be released, but the Green Blob didn’t care enough to audit it, or to be outraged when it was failing.
Environmental success is measured in terms of money, not megatonnes. (How does “89 trillion” sound?).
And success was supposed to be measured in degrees C in any case, but the Greenblob doesn’t care whether the policies do that either. If heat is the problem, why is the amount of cooling irrelevant? And if windfarms are good for the environment, how come hardly anyone seems to care when it slaughters and roasts endangered birds?
Abbott was too dangerous because he gave Greens exactly what they *said* they wanted
Tony Abbott out-greened the Greens and threatened to expose that their fake concern. His “Direct Action plan” saved far more CO2 than the carbon taxes of the GreenBlob parties. He achieved cuts in CO2 for $14 a ton instead of spending $1,500 a ton. Direct Action is 5, 10 or 327 times more effective than The Carbon Tax. For the same amount of money, he could save a lot more planet.
If the Green Blob cared about CO2, Abbott would be called a hero — the statesman from the conservative side that got results. Instead he’s a pariah. Indeed, it’s because he called their bluff that made him so dangerous. He gave them what they said they wanted — reductions in CO2, but he didn’t give them what they really wanted — power, money and the glorious sense that they are superior.
The Green Blob wear the mask of concern, but judging by their actions it’s just the cloak that hides self-serving, freeloading ambitions. If they really put the planet first, they would not be trying to save it with erratic wind and expensive solar power. They eschew all the cheap efficient options because those only reduce CO2 (which appears to be irrelevant) and don’t help with the real goal, namely bigger-government and a smaller independent sector.
If the goal is money and power, reducing CO2 through cheap efficient means would actually be counter productive. It would stop the flow of cash to the patron saints of wind and solar and show how pointless they are:
One MIT study estimated the cost of abating carbon with wind was about $60 AUD per ton, and the cost of solar was $700 AUD per ton. (Marcantonini, 2013). Another estimate put the price of carbon reduction at South Australian windfarms at $1484 per ton.
All up, something like “£14 billion has been lost to fraud”. The system was corrupted at every level — in Denmark at one stage, 4 out of 5 carbon trading accounts were fraudulent. The Ukraine and Russian governments gave away too many carbon credits, which flooded the market (and the price fell from £20 to £4). Credits were also given for things that would have happened anyway and shouldn’t have got them. (How can anyone base a market on “intentions”?) In the end, even though credits were cheap, a lot of companies didn’t bother buying credits, because no one was checking to see if they met their supposed requirements. And then there was the huge VAT Tax fraud across borders.
Where are most Greens, most NGO’s and activists, where is the outrage?
The fakery around the CO2 scare is legion. It is supposedly the evil pollution set to destroy life on Earth but even most climate extremists don’t care if it is actually being reduced. The whole story of the carbon markets is one of neglect — the point of the markets is evidently NOT to reduce CO2.
Emission impossible as EU fails to police main anti-pollution scheme
“The truth about the ETS is that it has completely failed. It has cost business money and done nothing to reduce CO2. It is based on a fundamentally flawed premise and as the latest report shows, all attempts to fix it are doomed.”
— Raoul Ruparel, deputy director of the Open Europe thinktank
The EU’s main scheme for reducing CO2 emissions is almost never enforced, according to an official report by Brussels’ own spending watchdog.
Only one EU country inspected – Britain – makes on-the-spot visits to factories to check whether they are staying within their carbon limits under the scheme, the EU Court of Auditors found. Even the UK only checks 1 per cent of sites, down from 5 per cent before.
The auditors also said that attempts to stamp out endemic fraud in the EU’s flagship Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), from which billions of pounds of “carbon credits” have been stolen by criminals, are “not adequate” and continue to leave “significant security weaknesses.”
The verdicts will be deeply embarrassing on the eve of the United Nations climate summit in Paris, where European leaders will claim the ETS as their flagship achievement to tackle climate change.
This study really reinforces how important it is for skeptics to be heard. Just get out there, write letters to the editor, email your MP, and speak up at public events. It does help.
There’s a new long detailed study out struggling with how to keep Climate Fear alive. Oh, the disappointment, exposing people to both sides of the story created more skeptics. The researchers tried all their best angles, like pretending that using expensive energy would “help the economy”, or “free the nation from a dependence on foreign oil”. They tried the religious frame “we’re protecting god’s creation” and they tried what they thought was a nationalist frame (but which was really just another gonzo economic claim dressed up with US-flattery) “Innovative technology will keep our nation’s economy strong”.
Not surprisingly these dud messages don’t work. McCright et al miss the point that if they are selling schemes to change the weather, the best salesman would list the direct benefits — like how much nicer a cooler world will be, with fewer storms and floods, less heatwaves, and more cold days in winter, stuff like that right. (I can’t think why they don’t?) Could it be that no matter what suit they put the skunk in, it still stinks? Lipstick on a pig… The bottom line is that people don’t really believe we can slow storms, and control the weather, and they don’t really like a cold climate much either. No one believes that solar panels will reduce floods, or that windmills will bring rain in a drought. The believers can’t sell the direct benefits because they are preposterous, which leaves them selling weak messages about fake schemes to boost the economy, or the fear of “looking like a pariah”, or being called a “denier”. Because they are hobbled by that gulf with reality, the sales team just can’t compete with even the basic skeptical messages. No wonder they try so desperately hard to silence skeptics. It is their best tactic.
The researchers McCright et al are hunting for the impossible, the magical phrase or angle that will convert the fence-sitters to believe the fantasy. As usual they’ve done exhaustive, dedicated and pointless work. (Is that government funded?) They start with namecalling — there are “deniers” everywhere, and not surprisingly they finish with nothing. As long as they assume the climate models are right they’ll be banging their heads against the wall.
As world leaders meet this week and next at a historic climate change summit in Paris, a new study by Michigan State University environmental scientists suggests opponents of climate change appear to be winning the war of words.
“Hello I am very happy to talk to you about the daily COP21 … in freedom,” Verdier said in his first segment on Russia Today, according to a translation by The Daily Caller News Foundation, clearly taking a swipe at the French media for firing him.
And you thought we’d heard it all. Not so, get out the plastic bags.
Seventy percent of the oxygen on Earth is made by phytoplankton, so the little critters do matter. A new study suggests that the phytoplankton pretty much fall apart if the worlds oceans heat by just six degrees. They stop making the good O2. We all die. Puppies, kittens, kids, and krill — it’s all over.
There are a couple of caveats — the study involves only binary phytoplankton (the kind made of zero’s and ones and which lives in hard discs at the University of Leicester). And the other one is that six degrees is an Awful Lot of Warming.
As best as we can tell (which is not very well) the oceans are warming at four hundreth of a degree per decade (give or take a lot). The all new Gee-Whizz Argo buoys are neat little robots, but the error bars are still a scandal, being somewhere from one tenth to one half a degree — ha-d-ha — too big to fit on the graph.( See all the white stuff — the errors are probably larger than that.)
Taking that single point of highly uncertain decadal data and extrapolating it absurdio apros (as befits this current study) — if that warming trend is real and continues, and phytoplankton remain identical despite massive selective pressure — at the current rate we only have 150 decades to wait before the oceans hit the 6C tipping point.
Trouble in 1500 years. Panic now. Panic Tomorrow. Send us your money!
Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on planet Earth than flooding, according to researchers from the University of Leicester.
Got no actual data-trail on “big-oil” dollars? That’s no reason not to run another name-calling smear article. A Yale group has spent countless months reading through the tea-leaves of old worn out climate themes and think they’ve discovered that the Kochs and Exxon carried the most influence.
What’s really remarkable is that the Yale group had so much funding they could trawl through 40,000 documents, track 4556 people and 164 “contrarian” organisations across 20 years and through 39 million words. Yet despite this, they found nothing. There’s no smoking gun, no proof that anyone was being dishonest, that the messages were wrong.
What the Yale team found was that “documents produced by lobbyists backed by two key corporate benefactors (Koch and Exxon) — proved to have been reproduced more often and with more “semantic similarity”. Justin Farrell (of Yale) thinks that means the Koch’s and Exxon are artificially skewing public opinion. Here’s another hypothesis — Exxon and the Kochs are smart businessmen. They spotted the leading skeptics in the 1990’s and gave them some help. The messages stuck with the public because they were good ones, not because they were “oil funded”. Farrell gets cause and effect confused.
Despite running down 40,000 rabbit holes, Farrell misses the numbers that matter when it comes to money and influence. If the Koch money has influence, the trainload of government money ought be 5000 times more influential. If, as Farrell says, only 14% of Americans think man-made climate change matters, either Koch and Exxon money is wildly effective, or just possibly, the government funded argument is a loser and 86% of Americans have figured that out.
Never before has there been so many egos in the one room:
It was the largest single-day gathering of heads of state or government in history, the UN said.
“Never have the stakes of an international meeting been so high because it concerns the future of the planet, the future of life,” French President Francois Hollande said in an opening speech.
Glory be. Pray to our Elected Fathers (and Mothers) who have come to save us from our sins.
The Chosen Ones shall rescue us with full gloss PR. For it is only in the world of Mass Marketing that we can call China a climate saviour:
[Obama] then met Chinese President Xi Jinping before the summit started, with his focus turned to deepening co-operation between the world’s two biggest emitters of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
“As the two largest carbon emitters, we have both determined that it is our responsibility to take action,” Mr Obama said as he sat alongside Mr Xi.
And so it comes to pass that the largest producer of carbon dioxide “pollution”, the land with the dirtiest factories can be lauded. (And the journalists will largely fall for this fanciful narrative.
Based on past numbers, in the next 12 months, China will increase its emissions by an amount that is more than Australia’s total annual emissions. As is already widely known, it’s likely Chinese population growth will peak in 2030, as will their emissions. The Chinese are flatly smiling, watching Western competitors cripple their own industries, while they reap income from selling solar panels, and then take money for carbon credits from cleaning up a few of the worst factories. What’s not to like?
If Australia somehow “succeeds” in cutting our emissions by a whopping, preposterous 25%, at the moment China will replace that in 45 days.
Our little blue planet needs saving, From the egos in Paris now raving, About climate control, As their ultimate goal, When it’s lust for world power they’re craving.
Here’s the full copy of a half page advert in The Australian. In a normal world, this would be discussed at conferences, and reported by science reporters in magazines like New Scientist or Scientific American, or on shows like Catalyst. Instead, private citizens have to fork out thousands to pay for an advert. — Jo
WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT CLIMATE
The climate cooled for 37 years during the period 1940 to 1976. Books were written expressing alarm. Lowell Ponte’s 1975 book warns: “Global cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for 110,000 years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance: the survival of ourselves, our children, our species.”
We now have a new climate alarm and similar statements are being made. Climate models used by authorities forecast that CO2 emissions will cause dangerous global warming, now referred to as Climate Change.
Sources: Various, as described in the “State of the Climate in 2012” in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society1, August 2013.
PSYCHOLOGY, BIAS ERRORS AND CLIMATE
Recent findings in the area of psychology, “Psychology and Economics” by the eminent behavioural economist Prof. Matthew Rabin, University of California, show the prevalence of a number of bias errors when people make decisions. Such errors are relevant for climate scientists in examining the evidence claimed to support the threat of dangerous global warming with rising CO2 levels. The following reviews the importance of two key bias errors referred to by Prof. Rabin in his paper.
The bias error of “there is a misinterpretation that purely random events are too long to be purely random and represent a long term trend”.
The Australian Millennium Drought from 1997 to 2010 was misinterpreted as a long term trend as a consequence of Climate Change. This lent support to State Governments over-investing in desalination plants.
Research by Professor Sir Samuel Wadham, University of Melbourne of world climate over 100 years, revealed that Australia of all countries has the most variable rainfall. This is not well appreciated by policy makers or investors.
The bias error of “once forming a view people are often inattentive to information contradicting their view. There is the problem of selective scrutiny of evidence”.
A bias problem of “selective scrutiny of evidence” that carbon dioxide emissions drive Climate Change is illustrated by the following:
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Wow. Just wow. Tony Thomas has uncovered the material 
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