Recent Posts
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Saturday
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If only we’d built those offshore wind turbines, eaten more cricket-burgers, we could have stopped the floods, right?
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Friday
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If UK had never tried renewables, each person would be £3,000 richer
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Thursday
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New AI data centers will use the same electricity as 2 million homes
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Wednesday
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No one knows what caused the Blackout but Spain is using more gas and nukes and less solar…
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Half of Australia doesn’t want to pay a single cent on Net Zero targets
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Saturday
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Secret comms devices, radios, hidden in solar inverters from China. Would you like a Blackout with that?
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Friday
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LSE junk study says if men didn’t eat so much red meat we’d have nicer weather
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Thursday
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Now they tell us? Labor says new aggressive Net Zero policy they hid from voters “is popular”
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Wednesday
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British politics in turmoil after Reform’s wins — Greens Deputy even attacks Net Zero from the left
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Children of 2020 face unprecedented exposure to Extreme Climate Nonsense…
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Saturday
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60% are skeptics: Only 13% of UK voters say Net Zero is more important than cost of living
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Friday
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Climate change is causing South Africa to rise and sink at the same time
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Thursday
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Why is the renewables industry allowed to sponsor political advertising in schools and call it “education”?
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Wednesday
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In trying to be a small target, the Liberals accidentally disappeared
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Tuesday
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Monday
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The best thing about the Australian election was that Nigel Farage’s party won 30% in the UK
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Sunday
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Saturday — Election Day Australia
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Vote for freedom…
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Friday
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Bombshell: Sir Tony Blair says climate policies are unworkable, irrational, and everyone is afraid of being called a denier
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Thursday
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Blackout in Spain to cost 2-4 billion Euro, likely due to solar plants — blind and biased ABC says “cause is a mystery”
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Wednesday
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Days after Spain reaches 100% renewable, mass blackouts hit, due to mysterious “rare atmospheric phenomenon”
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Tuesday
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Help needed: Site under DDoS attack from hundreds of thousands of unique IPs this week — especially China and the USA
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Monday: Election Day Canada
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When the Labor Party talk about “The Science” the Opposition can easily outflank and outgun them with bigger, better science
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Saturday
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UK Gov spends £50 m to dim sun to create slightly less beach weather
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Friday
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The cocoa price crisis is a Big Government price fixing disaster, not a climate change one
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Australians keep voting against climate taxes, but in 2016 we’re having an election based on climate. (We get the choice of “Bad” or “Worse”. For the economy, it’s the TNT-plan or the Nuclear-bomb?)
The Liberals are offering the obscene cut of 26 – 28% from 2005 by 2030. As a nation dependent on fossil fuels, with no nuclear or no new hydro on offer, the target is ridiculous. With the most rapidly growing population in the West, and one of the most energy intensive export industries globally, it’s economically suicidal. The Labor Party have a fantasy that it should be 45%. (Why not 85%?)
As far as the election goes in 2016, our only hope is to elect minor party and independent Senators to stop our two main parties from hobbling the nation. Start planning now.
According to the opposition spokesman Mark Butler on the 7:30 Report last night, the 45% fantasy will all be fine, because energy use and economic development will be “decoupled” (for the first time in human history) and new technology will save us. We’ll have profoundly different cars he says.
Look at what the last 15 years have done for cars…
 Imagine how different cars will be in 2030? Hey, but the last 15 years have been pretty profound for the Volkswagen. ;- ) Back then, who would have predicted cars would be smart enough to cheat on lab tests?
If Butler means “electric cars” – he ought know that if they are recharged by coal-power, they’re worse for the environment, and each new car on our grid could cost $2000 per year more for the grid infrastructure. Not to mention that Australian’s don’t want them, with total sales over the last five years averaging to four whole electric cars each week across the entire nation.
Here’s that interview below; note that at no time does Mark Butler answer any question by bringing in actual scientific or engineering, points. Apparently the Labor Party picked the 45% target because a committee suggested it. When pushed to justify it, it turned out to be not a target, but just a “starting point”, which doesn’t need justification.
How will Australia achieve this mindblowing goal? Not with nuclear power, not by damning every river valley, and not by converting all our coal to ultra-super-critical hot burners. No mention of those. Instead we’ll do it on “hope”.
But there’s always the possibility we just keep burning all the coal anyway but ship trillions of dollars to foreign bankers for carbon credits to make us feel good about. We can also ship our factories to China, and stop using air conditioners. But Butler didn’t mention that. Neither did Sabra Lane.
SABRA LANE: Based on the sorts of figures that were achieved under the carbon price when Labor was in Government, the carbon price came up to $23 a ton. Assuming that an Emissions Trading Scheme is part of your plan in achieving a 45 per cent cut in emissions, that would put the dollar cost at something like $200 a ton based on understandings by Warwick McKibben?
MARK BUTLER: That’s not right at all. Warwick McKibben did some modelling Tony Abbott’s Government. He modelled a range of targets frankly from doing pretty much nothing right up to 45 per cent cut, the sort of recommendation you saw on the Climate Change Authority’s report. Mr McKibben found by 2030 if you adopted a 45 per cent target there would only be a difference of about 0.3 per cent of GDP compared to the target Tony Abbott and now Malcolm Turnbull are taking to Paris. Really a very, very modest impact on the broader economy but what professor McKibben also found was that there would be a substantial positive impact on investment because obviously of the need to change to newer technology and invest much more in renewable energy.
SABRA LANE: The 45 per cent figure, as you say, comes from the Climate Change Authority report. It found even a cut of 30 per cent by 2025 would require a sharp reduction in emissions intensity of the Australian economy and would impose severe burdens on certain industries. What sorts of industries would close under your plan?
MARK BUTLER: Well, not necessarily any industries would close. A 45 per cent cut-
SABRA LANE: A 45 per cent cut is a huge cut and there would be some industries would be hugely impacted.
MARK BUTLER: Well 45 per cent is a starting point for our discussions but it is a substantial change to the way in which we do business over the course of 15 years but I think your viewers Sabra would see all around them incredible changes in technology happening, the way in which we produce electricity, the sorts of technology we use around the house and in many businesses and they’re starting to see the production of very, very different models of motor vehicles as well. I think most Australians understand that by 2030 the way in which we do so many things will be profoundly different to what we’ve become used to over recent decades and those substantial reductions in carbon pollution levels will be decoupled. The CSIRO only said in the last couple of weeks, will be decoupled increasingly from the path of economic growth.
Mark Butler is opposition spokesman for the Environment.
Car images Wikimedia: VT Holden: VF Holden
How much has that fuel economy improved? In the year 2000 — Holden Commodore VT was a V6 Automatic getting City / Highway: 12.0 / 7.2 (L/100km) The Holden Commodore 2015 specs claim fuel consumption combined is 9.7/100km. (Can someone find me the equivalent “profoundly” different figures now?)
9.3 out of 10 based on 73 ratings
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8.2 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
The notch in the Sun-Earth relationship is the dog that didn’t bark — the clue that was there all along, telling us something about the way the Sun influences Earth’s climate. There is a flicker of extra energy coming in at the peak of every solar cycle — roughly every 11 years. It’s only a small peak, but there is no warming on Earth at all — it’s like the energy that vanished. A good skeptic would be saying but, the increase in energy is so small, how could we find it among the noise? And the answer is that Fourier maths is so good at doing this that it is used every day to find the GPS signals which (as David details below) are so much smaller than the noise that they are much harder to find than this signal from the Sun.
Thousands of engineers know about and use Fourier maths and notch filters, but due to a strange one-sided bureaucratic funding model, none of those thousands of experts have applied that knowledge, which is so well adapted to feedback systems to the Sun Earth energy flows. David has used an input-output “black box” method to find the empirical transfer function and discover the notch. Viva the independent scientist, supported only by independent donations — at a fraction of the cost of the billion dollar models, David Evans has done something in three years which none of the bureaucrat-driven golden icons have managed in thirty years.
Is the notch real? It shows up independently in different eras and different datasets (see fig 2). What does it mean? Something is occurring which is “tuned” to the solar cycles to change the way the Earth reacts to incoming solar radiation just as that radiation peaks. The mechanism for this must originate on the Sun, because the timing is too accurate, and that unknown mechanism obviously has an influence on Earth’s temperature (maybe through clouds). Obviously to build a full climate model we need to understand that.
Notch filters are used in electronics to filter out “hum”. Notch filters usually do not involve a delay, but they could, which alerted us to the possibility of a delay. This eventually led to the discovery of an 11-year (or half solar cycle) delay, originating on the Sun, between the solar peaks in sunlight and the factor that neutralizes their effect. David discusses a few possible mechanisms in a later post. He finds evidence suggesting that that this indirect effect of the Sun is ~14 times more powerful at driving changes in our climate than the influence of variations in direct solar heating. Something about the Sun, some force, is changing conditions on Earth in a way that conventional climate models don’t understand. They are “plugging the gap” with CO2 in the last 50 years, but can’t possibly work until they understand this missing key. In this post we start the hunt.
Thank you to those who keep us going. Together we hope to advance our understanding of what controls the climate…
— Jo
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21. The Notch in the Empirical Transfer Function
Dr David Evans, 27 November 2015, Project home, Intro, Previous, Next.
This post begins the search for the cause of global warming. This is the most mathematical post of the solar part of this series.
We start by finding the empirical transfer function from total solar irradiance (TSI) to surface temperature — which tells us how much surface warming we get per increase in TSI, at each frequency. We find an unexpected notch therein, and discuss its implications.
Our Formal System
For simplicity while searching for a relationship between TSI S and the surface temperature TS, we assume that the TSI is the only influence on TS. As discussed in the previous post, it is plausible that TSI is a dominant cause of global warming — or more precisely, contains information about a dominant cause because the mechanism is indirect. If TSI mostly predicts TS, and there is a strong and obvious relationship between them, then this assumption is adequate for the exploratory analysis here.
Formally, consider the system whose input is the TSI anomaly at 1 AU (the change in TSI at the average distance of the Earth from the Sun, one astronomical unit), denoted by ΔS, and whose output is the mean global surface temperature anomaly, ΔTS. Both ΔS and ΔTS are functions of time.
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Figure 1: The formal system under consideration: surface warming 100% controlled by changes in TSI.
Some Background on Transfer Functions
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9.2 out of 10 based on 80 ratings
 … In evolutionary terms, it’s a blink. Around 1200-1400AD a bunch of people bought a few domestic horses to far east freezing Siberia, where the temperature sometimes falls below -70. Somehow the horses have already become physiologically and genetically well adapted to the extreme climate. The panic-merchants would have us believe that the climate is changing “faster than evolution”, but biology and genes turn out to be amazingly flexible. (Who knows, maybe 4 million years of swinging ice ages has that effect on gene pools?)
DNA studies revealed that these horses were all derived from distant domestic horses, even though wild unrelated horses lived in the region til 5,000 years ago. This is pretty spectacular.
Dr. Ludovic Orlando: “This is truly amazing as it implies that all traits now seen in Yakutian horses are the product of very fast adaptive processes, taking place in about 800 years. This represents about a hundred generations for horses. That shows how fast evolution can go when selective pressures for survival are as strong as in the extreme environment of Yakutia.”
Analyzing the genomes shows that it’s not driven by mutations in genes as much as by changes to the regulatory parts of the genome. In other words, the instructions about the instructions changed. Useful genes (like fur) get expressed more often, less useful ones become dormant. Imagine all mammal species, say, carry a similar toolkit. It’s not a question of inventing fur, just of making it thicker, or stick around longer. A bit like building houses — if we change the instructions – the same tools and types of materials can make good houses in both Darwin and Greenland. A brick is a brick, but you can have lots of bricks, high walls, thicker walls, and empty spaces. A small change in the plans makes all the difference.
Humans, mammoths and horses appear to have separately picked up changes in things like shivering, or fur thickness that help them adapt to the extreme cold. It’s called “convergent” evolution.
It doesn’t prove that all species will adapt to big changes, but it shows that things are (yet again) a lot better than the apocalyptic scenarios suggest. It’s possible that life can adapt.
To believe that a slight climate-change,
Could destroy life on Earth is most strange,
When in fact what we find,
Is that beasts and mankind,
Can adapt through a vast climate range.
— Ruairi
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Adapting to -70 degrees in Siberia: a tale of Yakutian horses
FROM COLD TO COLDER
From an evolutionary perspective it happened almost overnight. In less than 800 years Yakutian horses adapted to temperatures of -70 degrees found in the extreme environments of eastern Siberia. The adaptation mechanisms involved the same genes found in humans as well as the extinct wooly mammoth.
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9.1 out of 10 based on 46 ratings
Shucks. A few days before the giant UNFCCC starts in Paris, Climate Spectator has been closed. (Didn’t know it existed? It was a part of the Business Spectator). Maybe Big Renewables is not doing such a roaring big business?
You can see how active and non-stop the pro-green energy message was, thanks to Google caching of The Climate Spectator. That was yesterday. For some odd reason the headline link to it is already gone, obliviated already and fed through to the mother-publication by default. Typically, the more popular articles got 5 – 10 comments, the rest, zero. To get the flavor, see “Going off grid” — where Tristan Edis argues that all that solar energy you make will be wasted (and it will cost you a lot of money too). He seems to think that intermittent unreliable energy is “useful” to the Grid, and there’s no sense in the article that I can see of the waste of the Grid’s resources and energy in accommodating his surplus.
The collapse of the Climate Spectator is of course, framed by some as “Murdoch strikes again”. Presumably Murdoch acquired it in 2012 and has been waiting all this time to fulfil his evil plan…
The Climate Spectator was part of suite of news website that came with the acquisition of Australian Independent Business Media by News Corp in 2012….
It’s a conspiracy you know. Though the love media, like Fairfax, have also been cutting other journalists. Coincidence?
Editor, Tristan Edis let slip that he sometimes cursed the competition from The Conversation:
“The Conversation has also added a new insightful set of voices, even though I often cursed it for taking away several learned voices of friends and long-time colleagues I would have preferred to have been writing for Climate Spectator exclusively.
Yet again the government funded groups help drive out the free market competitor that provides the same service at no expense to the taxpayer.
It’s tough competing with the ABC, SBS, and The Conversation.
The Climate Spectator may be just another victim of Big-government.
h/t to Jim S.
9 out of 10 based on 53 ratings
Has there ever been a greater disconnect between what the elected leaders are offering and what the public really wants?
Obama must know what these polls say, so when he tells us that “climate change is the greatest threat” we know he’s not doing it to win votes. If he is hoping to “lead” the people, his failure is dismal.
Is there any doubt left that The Climate Cause serves politicians and not the people?
 … The numbers have shifted since July when the survey was last done. “Terrorism was up from 11% to 24% thanks to Paris. The economy and jobs was down from 30% to 21%. Climate change was all of 5% then, dropped to 3% now (pretty much in the error margin).
SOURCE: Fox News Survey. 1,016 registered voters of a random national sample with a margin of error of plus or minus 3%.
8.5 out of 10 based on 61 ratings
 .. In 1475, the word “Denier” meant those who did not accept the church doctrine.
Five hundred years later, not much has changed.
“According to the Oxford English Dictionary, OED, the term “denier” — starting with its coinage in 1475, during the language’s transition period — has traditionally been used in a theological context, as in “Deniers of Christ Jesus.”
— Yale Climate Media Forum
The use of “Denier” in a theological sense continued for hundreds of years. Here it is in 1835:
“A denier of our Lord’s divinity will argue that it was an exclamation of surprise and ignorance; he makes it, in fact, a sort of modern profaneness.
The Literary and Theological Review, Leonard Woods Junior, 1835. p449
In 2015, anyone who thinks that leeks and lightbulbs won’t stop floods in Peru is a “denier”. If you don’t accept that your air-conditioner causes war in Syria, or that sharks can protect us from heatwaves, get used to being referred to as a mindless denying apostate.
I’ve put in excerpts from an 1840 book below. Breathe deeply:
“FOURTH. Point out the difficulties of Atheism
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8.8 out of 10 based on 80 ratings
How many Presidential candidates are susceptible to groupthink, scare campaigns and low-base science agitprop? Thanks to Seth Borenstein, Michael Mann & Andrew Dessler we can rank them according to their ability to resist profoundly unscientific propaganda like “there is a consensus”.
Ted Cruz is clearly the best at holding his own in the independent thinker stakes. Ben Carson and Donald Trump do well. But poor Hillary Clinton doesn’t stand a chance against the onslaught of junk graphs, hyperbolic claims, and inane bumper-sticker cliches.
 … Those who fall for the consensus argument are in no position to run a nation. Firstly it’s profoundly unscientific — we don’t vote for the laws of science; scientific theories are either true or not true regardless of opinions. Secondly, it only takes ten minutes of independent searching to find that there is no consensus among scientists as a broad group, anyway. There is a consensus among various definitions of certified climate scientists, but not among meteorologists , geoscientists and engineers or other hard science areas.
As I’ve said before, skeptics outrank and outnumber believers, they make planes fly, find mineral deposits, and walked on the moon. Believers produce climate models that don’t work. If climate scientists were good scientists, the first people they’d convince would be the physicists, mathematicians, geologists and engineers.
Most readers of skeptical blogs (who chose to respond to surveys and list their qualifications in comments^) have hard science degrees. Dan Kahan conducted a survey of 1,500 people and found people who knew more about maths and science were more likely to be skeptical. In other words, skeptics were better informed about science^. If we had to name a list of skeptics versus believers, the skeptics number 31,000, yet there is no list of named scientists who believe that comes close — let alone a list of 300,000 which would imply some truth to the statement that the science is settled, and the world’s scientists agree.
The famous 97% consensus is really a 0.3% consensus.
See real scientists review climate science with thousands of peer reviewed papers. NIPCC report.
Climate Depot, Pat
UPDATE: Even among certified climate scientists only 43% agree with the IPCC that man-made CO2 is the main driver of climate change.
9.3 out of 10 based on 95 ratings
We are back in the hunt for the main mystery drivers of our climate. The IPCC says it can’t be the Sun because the total amount of sunlight barely changes. Which is the usual half-truth that pretends the Sun is simple a ball of fire with no magnetic field, no solar wind, and has no changes in the “color” of the spectrum it emits. But the Sun has a massive fluxing magnetic field that turns itself inside out and upside down regularly, it churns off a stream of charged particles that rain on Earth, and if human eyes could see infra red and UV, we’d see the color of the Sun change through the cycle. We are only just beginning to figure out how these aspects affect the climate. But we know these factors influence ozone, probably cloud seeding, and possibly jet streams.
The only good long data we have on the Sun are the sunspots, which give us a reasonable idea of total sunlight since 1610. David uses Fourier maths to find the way that total solar irradiance (TSI) might relate to temperatures on Earth. TSI itself barely changes, so it could only have caused about 10% of the variation of Earth’s temperature since 1900 (if the official temperature records are to be believed). But it’s the main clue we’ve got to figure out how other parts of the solar dynamo may be changing the weather here on Earth.
The most likely mechanism is through cloud cover, which covers 60% of the Earth and reflects 30% of the incoming energy. And small change will make a big difference. David‘s model looks for externally driven changes to albedo, which means forces other than surface warming that influence our clouds. The IPCC assumes this doesn’t happen. What can I say? Their models don’t work.
The notch delay solar model is a physical model, based on physical principles, not curve fitting. It uses standard analytical tools employed throughout the electronics industry. Few climate scientists were trained in them — they have probably never heard of most of them. But engineers have to get the maths and the feedbacks right, or the phone and the electricity don’t work… these tools have been tested.
When the signals from the Sun are pulled apart this way, the patterns show a classic notch filter. At the frequency of a half solar cycle (about 11 years), some mechanism operates which temporarily reduces the effect of incoming solar radiation. Because it is so in tune with solar cycles it must originate on the Sun itself. Further, here seems to be a delay between changes in TSI and its effect on Earth’s temperature, also of about 11 years. The maths of notch filters shows this delay might be part of the notching mechanism, or might be separate. Obviously sunlight itself is not having a delayed effect on Earth 11 years later, instead a change in total sunlight is a leading indicator of some other solar factor that changes a half cycle after TSI changes. The delay is synched to the Sun. The exact mechanism is still to be figured out (there are several candidates).
David updates the progress on this from last year. While we said then that a notch filter dictated that there had to be a delay, Bernie Hutchins pointed out that it didn’t guarantee it. But by then we’d found other independent empirical evidence — published in a few papers over the last 20 years, that indicate a delay must be occurring.
–Jo
20. So What Is the Main Cause of Global Warming?
Dr David Evans, 22 November 2015, Project home, Intro, Previous, Next.
Background of the last 19 posts: our understanding of carbon dioxide is framed by the top-down conventional basic climate model. But that model has major architectural errors. When the errors are fixed, the model estimates the Earth is not very sensitive to carbon dioxide. Indeed, it’s an order of magnitude less important than the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculated. All that extra atmospheric carbon dioxide very likely caused less than 20% of the global warming of recent decades*. (Kindly note that those findings are logically distinct from the notch-delay hypothesis coming up, so even if that hypothesis proves to be wrong then the critique of the architecture of the conventional basic climate stands.)
So if carbon dioxide is not the cause of 80% of global warming, what is? Let’s start by ruling out what it is not.
It’s Not Variations in Direct Heating by the Sun
The dog-obvious suspect is the Sun. But the IPCC is adamant that it’s is not that important. You have to read the fine print – they only consider the direct heating effect of the total solar irradiation (TSI), not all the other potential solar factors.
Figure 1: The energy from the Sun is almost constant. (Source)
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8.8 out of 10 based on 85 ratings
Will Obama and the UN succeed in forcing “climate taxes” on the US?
h/t to GWPF for finding the stories that matter
When the press releases come out saying that Paris has succeeded (which will happen, no matter the outcome) the key factor is not just whether the agreement has any meaningful teeth, but whether it can be forced on the US without approval of Congress. The US didn’t approve Kyoto, and now, more than then, there is no reason to think anything significant would get through. The GOP Republican candidates are not paying lip service to the global warming meme anymore, things have changed so much they’re almost all competing to be skeptics. Just 6 weeks ago a poll in the US showed the amazing, astonishing result that 31% of respondents agreed with GOP candidates statement that Climate change is a total hoax.
The EU and UN players know they can’t convince the US people, and nor can they get past their elected reps so they are talking of doing things in ways that don’t require congressional approval. Naturally, if they had overwhelming evidence, and half a case, they wouldn’t have to do that.
No matter what country you live in, remind all your politicians, journalists, and delegates to Paris that no matter what Obama says or signs, the US Congress is vowing not to pour money into the climate deals.
U.S. Senate Republicans on Wednesday said Congress would not approve the Obama administration’s $500 million request for its first payment into a United Nations climate fund, a move they said would undermine the upcoming climate change summit in Paris.
“This president is going to go (to Paris) with no money,” said Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who chaired a hearing in the Senate environment panel on the international climate negotiations, which begin on Nov. 30.
Capito and other Republican members of the committee said they will ensure any deal the U.S. strikes in Paris will face congressional scrutiny, and warned they will block President Barack Obama’s 2016 budget request for the first tranche of the $3 billion pledged last year to the U.N. Green Climate Fund. — Reuters
The American Interest
Fifty two senators voted to block the US EPA rule that would cut coal power station emissions. While Obama could veto that, the message is that the Senate is not going to approve his climate ambitions:
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9.3 out of 10 based on 110 ratings
I’m travelling today…
7.4 out of 10 based on 17 ratings
How much further backward do things have to get?
In the great industrial nation of Germany power companies are going broke, and 350,000 households are getting their electricity turned off each year because they can’t afford the bills. In a nation of 82 million, power companies are issuing some 6 million threats to cut electricity.
Pierre Gosselin no trickszone: Socially explosive German homes losing power
From Speigel:
“Over the past three years it all totals to be a whopping 1.025 million households.”
“Spiegel writes that the price of electricity in Germany has doubled since 2002 in large part because of the renewable energy feed-in surcharge. Private households are the hardest hit; they have to pay some 45% more than the EU average (while German power producers get 30% less than the EU average)! The government-interfered market is grotesquely distorted.”
It is not only Germany’s power companies who are bleeding to death financially, but so are many private citizens, who are unable to pay for their power. A shocking situation in one of the world’s most technically advanced nations.
9.1 out of 10 based on 104 ratings
 The evidence is overwhelming right? Civilization is a pretty thin veneer, really.
Bullying and coercion is not just a school-yard thing. It’s everywhere and even at the highest levels.
This report on Australian surgeons was released a few months ago, uncovering bad behaviour from people we would normally think of as being outstanding and pretty darn smart. So bullying works even on people at the top of the pecking order, and in supposedly the most caring of professions.
We humans are a gregarious lot, and we pretend we’re all rational, but the pressure to conform and fit in is intense. Even for rational souls it’s easier to say nothing. No wonder the climate science debate is loaded with namecalling, bad manners, and petty mockery. Politicians and newspaper editors often don’t speak up because they are afraid of being called stupid or a “denier”.
Bullying, discrimination and sexual harassment are rife in the surgical profession, a damning report has found.
Half the surgeons and trainees who responded said they had been victimized.
We are winning the debate on the science, but we need to win the social war too:
Although about three out of five registered trainees surveyed said they’d been bullied, making complaints was widely believed to be “career suicide”.
Sexism was entrenched and endemic and sexual harassment pervasive, with women reporting they felt powerless to protest.
Skeptics often undervalue the networking and social effects. But it’s not enough to get the physics and the facts right, we need to reach the crowd.
Never underestimate the impact of sending emails and letters of support to the people you see taking that risk. (Heck, praise, approval and fear of retribution is what keeps most of the global scare campaign running — that and a few billion). Keep writing the letters to the editor, complaining to your universities and adding your comments to news stories. You may never get acknowledgment but it sucks the confidence from offenders and bolsters those who fight back. Bullies are stopped by third party observers who speak up.It’s a self esteem thing. Many of our most successful people in society hide their lack of confidence with science — they’re the ones deferring to “experts” (ain’t it especially so with science-journalists?)
9.1 out of 10 based on 84 ratings
If only we had more electric cars and windmills, lives could’ve been saved.
Ponder that air conditioners can cause people to do random acts of murder. They might keep people in the room calmer, but outside that pollution* travels, heats the world, and lo, a terrorist is made.
(Call me a skeptic, but I tend to think that if we turn off all the air-conditioners (or run them on solar power, which is almost the same thing) we might get more acts of terror rather than less, but what would I know?) Bernie Sanders says that we should stop terrorists by reducing our carbon emissions. Somehow, there were people who did not laugh at him.
Time Magazine : “Why Climate Change and Terrorism Are Connected”
Drought in Syria has contributed to instability
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders used the terrorist attacks in Paris to call for action to address climate change at a primary debate Saturday. But, while the plea attracted ridicule across the political spectrum, many academics and national security experts agree that climate change contributes to an uncertain world where terrorism can thrive.
U.S. military officials refer to climate change as a “threat multiplier” that takes issues like terrorism that would pose a threat to national security and exacerbates the damage they can cause. A 2014 Department of Defense report identifies climate change as the root of government instability that leads to widespread migration, damages infrastructure and leads to the spread of disease. “These gaps in governance can create an avenue for extremist ideologies and conditions that foster terrorism,” the report says.
The weather and violence link seems a bit unlikely at first, but think about it — if a big volcano had gone off in 1939, things would have been cooler, and Hitler might have been a lot nicer, say, more like Napoleon. Am I stretching the analogy? I sure hope so.
But we live in hope and pray to the Gods of Political Correctness that perhaps a volcano will go off and save the day — a spot of cooling and a dash of rain, and the murderous types of migrants will all head back where they came from and there will be peace.
But wait, what if it was a Big-Oil plot?
Oliver Tickell in the Ecologist wonders if the aim of the Paris terrorists was to save oil profits instead of being a reaction to dry weather?
“Is it a coincidence that the terrorist outrage in Paris was committed weeks before [the UN’s] COP21, the biggest climate conference since 2009? Perhaps. But failure to reach a strong climate agreement now looks more probable. And that’s an outcome that would suit ISIS – which makes $500m a year from oil sales – together with other oil producers.”
Tickell asked “ISIS Inc defending its corporate interests?”
As Bishop Hill says “A real OMG moment here folks”.
For commenters, thanks to Australia’s 18C laws on racial vilification — even if you are not discussing a race, but a meme or a religion — you can’t cause offence. Please [SNIP-18C] yourself. Don’t do it for their sake, do it for mine. For your info, it appears to be accepted in Australia to say mean and offensive things about Daesh believers.
Weep for our freedom of speech when talking about anyone else.
Niall Ferguson has an excellent article in The Australian and London Sunday Times.
h/t climatedepot.com, David, Colin,
*Pollution, aka fertilizer. What’s the difference?
9 out of 10 based on 69 ratings
We’ve had a lot of requests for a single document to summarize the blog posts so far. Some people like to print and read all in one place (that’s me). I hope this helps. Skeptics on threads are busy cracking away at getting a rerouting mechanism fleshed out. The quest… thanks to everyone who is supporting this project in so many ways, whether it be via email, sharing with others, or through donations. We really do appreciate it. We’re going to figure this out. :- ) — Jo
Dr David Evans, 15 November 2015, David Evans’ Basic Climate Models Home, Intro, Previous.
I’ve prepared a synopsis of the 19 posts in this series. It’s a standalone document of 20 pages that explains the important points, some from a different point of view than the blog series. The summary and introduction at the front are non-technical and suitable for politicians and journalists. The synopsis is light on for equations — there are some, but you can pretty much ignore them because it mostly reads fine without them.
If you wanted to show someone the series, this is the document to use. It is downloadable from the project home page, which is the url to give someone if you only give them one link to his work/series.
I’ve also written three introductory essays, which will soon be downloadable from there also.
Here is the synopsis: download.
8.9 out of 10 based on 72 ratings
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7.7 out of 10 based on 20 ratings
 … Paris is under seige — Multiple terrorists arrived with AK 47s and bombs strapped to themselves in six separate attacks. The latest toll is 153 127 dead, and France has closed its borders. Our thoughts go out to the victims of these pointless atrocities, to all of their friends and families, and to all of France, in shock.
The Bataclan concert hall was attacked and people taken hostage, “at least 112” killed. A SWAT team arrived and over 100 hostages were released. A suicide bomber attacked the Stade de France (the national stadium). President Holland had to be evacuated. There are gun attacks as well. There are reports of 14 people killed by gunshot at Le Petit Cambodge, a Cambodian restaurant.
Information from the CNN live update page.
Sky news Paris ‘bloodbath’ kills at least 160
UPDATE: Islamic State (ISIL) have claimed responsibility.
UPDATE: Death toll appears to be 127 plus 200+ injured, 99 critically.
Graphic sad stories in The Telegraph are rolling in.
With between forty and fifty thousand people converging on Paris in two weeks to start the UNFCCC COP21 meeting the obvious question is security and safety of everyone. WattsUp points out some journalists are asking if Paris will still host the climate talks. I find it hard to believe that massive conference-junket would be changed now, though some attendees will be feeling very anxious and some will drop out. Security will obviously be ramped up, but if every restaurant is a target, how safe can safe be? I expect the leaders could be closeted away in a secret location — the rest of the conference was mostly a cabaret. Given the size of the “theatre” and the heavy media presence that would be much more difficult to manage.
Anthony Watts so aptly quotes Obama, April 2015: “There is no greater threat to our planet than climate change”
I know this is a hot topic, please keep comments constructive and bear in mind this is primarily a science blog with volunteer moderators.
UPDATE: From The Wall St Journal / Australian
But today’s shootings and explosions across Paris illustrate the difficulty authorities in France and elsewhere face in containing a diffuse but deadly terror threat.
They also underscore the security challenge France will face when a global summit on climate change begins at the end of the month. The government this week decided to restore border checks during the summit, the first time it has taken that step in years. Over 100 world leaders are expected to attend the opening of the summit.
* The headline originally said “over 150 killed” but was revised 10 hours later to reflect updated numbers.
8.8 out of 10 based on 72 ratings
This is a big deal. Here’s a state government telling people to be more scientific, and not blindly follow the IPCC. This is a win we need to translate to other areas.
The former Labor government in NSW had told councils they had to plan for sea-level rise “according to the IPCC”, but that made sea-side properties unsalable, and was pretty painfully stupid compared to what the tide gauges were actually saying (like in Sydney where the rise is a tiny 6cm a century). The new strategy says councils need to be scientific and look at the conditions on each beach separately.
In this issue, the costs of following the IPCC plan were borne by those living on the coast (and property developers), and that pain motivated them to press the State government to get the IPCC out of the way. This is a reminder that it is worth protesting and sane things do happen.
If we can get citizens of the free west to appreciate the true cost of the IPCC, it would surely be gone by 2020. Now there’s a target..
In an interview with The Australian, Mr Stokes said he would be announcing “a much more scientific and evidence-based approach … it reflects recognition that what is happening on the coast is a product of what is happening to the sand off the coast,” he said.
“We will be integrating coastal management and planning with what is happening in the adjacent seabed.
The initiatives mark the second phase of the Coalition government’s demolition of the previous Labor government’s policy, which among other things directed local councils on the coast to enforce the climate change and sea level rise predictions of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Under that regime, councils in some cases included sea-level rise warnings on the planning certificates of some seaside properties based not on what was happening on the beaches concerned — including one that is acquiring sand naturally and pushing back the sea — but on IPCC predictions.
Many owners found that under this policy, their properties became almost unsaleable.
The Taree Council might be the smartest one of all — it plans to let the landowners figure it out themselves. They need to work out the risks, and how much action they should take. That will sort out the skeptics from the gullibles.
Congratulations to researcher Phil Watson, and Bob Carter, and to landholders on NSW coasts. I hear that some especially deserve credit: “Strong thanks are due to Batemans Bay residents Neville Hughes, Pat Aiken and other coastal NSW resident groups for their unwearying opposition to, and protests against, the former policy.”
More information
P. J. Watson (2011) Is There Evidence Yet of Acceleration in Mean Sea Level Rise around Mainland Australia?. Journal of Coastal Research: Volume 27, Issue 2: pp. 368 – 377. doi: 10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00141.1 [Link Abstract PDF ]
9.1 out of 10 based on 72 ratings
Blame dry weather and electronic sensors for a lot of Australia’s warming trend…
In this provocative report, retired research scientist Bill Johnston analyzes Australian weather records in a fairly sophisticated and very detailed way, and finds they are “wholly unsuitable” for calculating long term trends. He uses a multi-pronged approach looking at temperatures, historical documents, statistical step changes, and in a novel process studies the way temperature varies with rainfall as well.
His two major findings are that local rainfall (or lack of) has a major impact on temperatures in a town, and that the introduction of the electronic sensors in the mid 1990s caused an abrupt step increase in maximum temperatures across Australia. There will be a lot more to say about these findings in coming months — the questions they raise are very pointed. Reading, between the lines, if Johnston is right, a lot of the advertised record heat across Australia has more to do with equipment changes, homogenisation, and rainfall patterns than a long term trend.
Bill Johnston: On Data Quality [PDF]
“Trends are not steps; and temperature changes due to station changes, instruments and processing is not climate change”, he said. “The Bureau are pulling our leg”.
The years when more rain falls are more likely to be years without high maximums. Bill Johnston finds that for every 100mm of rainfall, the maximum temperatures were about a third of a degree cooler.
 On the left hand side, the step ups in temperature are shown. Electronic sensors were introduced in the mid 1990s. The right hand graphs show how rainfall keeps maximum temperatures cooler. (Data is grouped “a,b,c” between the steps). Johnston uses these rainfall correlations as a tool to check the quality of temperature records. When combined with step change analysis, he finds that unrecorded site moves or station changes are common. When the automatic sensors were introduced temperatures suddenly jump up, and their relationship with rainfall breaks down.
“Fleeting parcels of hot air, say from passing traffic or off airport runways, are more likely to be sensed by electronic instruments than by thermometers”, he said.
Automatic weather stations (AWS) were introduced across Australia’s network within a few years. Because so many stations made the switch around the same time, homogenization procedures don’t detect their bias, and assume a natural step up in warming occurred. Worse, the artificial warm bias is transferred to stations that are not automated, reinforcing trends that don’t exist!
“Homogenisation is nonsense, and an open public inquiry into the Bureau’s activities is overdue”, he said.
The Bureau must be audited. Stations should not be homogenized until they are analyzed individually. And the analysis should start with site inspections and a detailed historical account of what is known about each site.
“The Bureau has scant knowledge about many important sites”, Bill said, “and some of what they claim cannot be trusted”.
Temperature is strongly related to local rainfall
Hot years are dry years, and wet years are not hot. It’s tritely obvious, yet kinda profound. Johnston finds that from half to three quarters of the temperature variation is caused by changes in rainfall. When the land is bone dry, it heats up fast. But when soil moisture is high, the Sun has to evaporate the water first in order to heat the soil. The atmosphere above dry land has lower humidity and will rise and fall in temperature swings that are far larger than the atmosphere above moist landscapes. It varies somewhat with every town, but the relationship is consistent across the continent.
He also found that using rainfall to analyze temperature records reduces variation, while revealing aberrations in the data. What do we make of a town where the effect of rainfall on temperatures has a linear relationship for decades then suddenly changes to a random pattern? Homogenization can produce trends that don’t belong to the site.
New electronic sensors cause an artificial jump
Not only do electronic sensors pick up shorter spikes in temperature, they are also not linear instruments like mercury thermometers are. “AWS don’t measure temperature linearly like thermometers do; which causes them to spike on warms days. This biases the record.
There was also a wave of undocumented site and station changes around the time the Bureau took-over weather observations from the RAAF in the 1950s. To mention a few; locations affected included Alice Springs, Norfolk Island, Amberley, Broome, Mt. Gambier, Wagga Wagga and Laverton.
Disturbingly he finds that after many site and equipment changes have been accounted for, and the variability due to rainfall has been ruled out, no temperature trend remains.
Below Johnston discusses Cowra and Wagga in detail. He observed the weather at Wagga Wagga Research Centre, visited many other sites and discussed issues with the staff. He has worked with climate data, calibrated commercial automatic weather stations and used climate data in many of his peer-reviewed studies.
Bill is pushing for an open public inquiry into the Bureau’s methods; its handling of data and biases in climate records.
Bill Johnston points out that local rainfall is useful for checking temperature data
Ignoring heat-storage in the landscape, which is cyclical; the local energy balance partitions heat loss between evaporation, which is cooling when the local environment is moist; and sensible heat transfer to the atmosphere (advection) during the day and radiation at night, which is warming when the environment is dry. Thus the longer it’s dry, the hotter it gets.
Rainfall is (should-be) linearly related to temperature, especially Tmax, but independent of it.
If the local heat-load changes, forcing a significant base-level shift, the relationship is still linear but is offset by the impact of the change.
If data become grossly disturbed or dislocated from the site (it’s fabricated for example, or implanted from somewhere else), variation around the relationship increases, data become random to each other and statistical linearity is lost. (Rainfall seasonality may also impact on this, but is not considered here.)
So, linearity is expected; and we need a statistic that indicates how good (bad) the relationship is.
Keep reading →
9.3 out of 10 based on 92 ratings
Inside Divestment: The Illiberal Movement to Turn a Generation Against Fossil Fuels
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) study: Inside Divestment (pdf)
The Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement (FFDM) is running on more than 1000 American colleges and universities, and about 30 of them have “divested”. It’s embedded in the tertiary sector, some 4,000 profs have signed supportive petitions, and some teach it in lectures.
The authors of a new 290 page study on Divestment Campaigns say that it’s not the grassroots thing it poses as, but is driven by professional political activists and funded by wealthy donors and foundations. The organization pushing the US campaign, 350.org, pays and trains students to be activists. Key dates and events are decided from the top down.
It’s all another charade — the holier than thou promises to sell fossil fuel stocks are often just empty PR stunts. Most divestment declarations are empty PR — 66% of the universities are saying they divest but hanging on to some fossil stocks. And four universities have not sold a thing — including Oxford. (Where are those protests?). But in the end, it doesn’t matter whether the divestments actually happen, a mere detail, because if they did, they wouldn’t affect the share price anyway, and they certainly won’t cool the planet. Success is not about cutting CO2, emissions, or investments, it’s about getting out a press release, and then hyping up the students. (Though if the students also talk their uni funds into buying up solar and wind, I expect some renewables investors might be happy about that. Ka Ching. Ka Ching.)
The protests are — as per the norm at higher education — not about free persuasive debate, but about bullying, intimidation and smears. Fools like you and I might think students would be grateful for income from fossil fuel investments which fund their universities. Instead impressionable pawns are taught to hate the energy companies which probably help them make to their classes, and sit in a warm room when they get there. The whole idea is so nutty, anti-free speech, and bad mannered that naturally it’s most popular at places like Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Swarthmore. That’s where the most competitive students vie to be the most fashionable thinkers. Err, “congrats” to them.
I want to know where the student movement is that is protesting that universities are putting politics above students. How much extra do students have to pay to make up for the money burned on a symbolic protest? What are students missing out on because the investment board chose less profitable investments? Where are those placards…
Keep reading →
9.2 out of 10 based on 74 ratings
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