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Bolivia gets stoneage legal system

UPDATED: See below

It’s the ultimate in pre-cambrian law. Gaia in the courtroom. Shh. The Statutory Spirits are at work. It’s not just the right to life for amoeba, it’s the right not to have your cellular structure modified.

Looks like salad is off the menu.

So is meat, fruit, tea and coffee, and no you can’t eat moths either. Who will prosecute the next cougar which violates the constitution by chomping on a Flamingo?

Looks like 10 million people might get to subsist on organic free range eggs, and milk from consenting cows. Perhaps they can reach a trade agreement for honey with The Andean Bee Collective. But then it’s not clear the honey doesn’t have a right to exist too.

Bolivia enshrines natural world’s rights with equal status for Mother Earth

Law of Mother Earth expected to prompt radical new conservation and social measures in South American nation

* John Vidal in La Paz
* guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 April 2011 18.17 BST

John Vidal reports from La Paz where Bolivians are living with the effects of climate change every day Link to this video

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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Unthreaded

I’ve been with our five year old in hospital overnight (with asthma), and there is no time to post… thanks to all the people who have donated to Tim Ball’s case (and you can donate through Dr Ball’s website via paypal http://drtimball.com/), and to commenters and moderators here too.

Lubos has a nice line: “To err once is human, to err twice is accident, to err thrice is coincidence, to err four times is dumb, and to err 12 million times is to be David Suzuki.”

— Jo

h/t Val for the paypal address of Tim Ball.

5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

Legal warfare against skeptics: one win, one needs support…

The Big Scare Campaign is desperate, when they can’t win with reason, they can always find a reason to sue and hope to silence their critics. Their deep pockets make them an ominous foe, and the legal battles are running hot. Actions are running against Andrew Bolt, and Tim Ball (see below), and we only just found out, that one was launched against James Delingpole by the East Anglia CRU.

It’s very significant that James Delingpole has won and won well, as James says:

If it sounds like I’m overdoing it, consider this: the PCC’s ruling must be among the first by any quasi-official body anywhere in the world to take the side of a Climate Change sceptic rather than that of the Warmist establishment. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

The Commissions ruling:

In particular, the complainants were concerned that the blog posts described Professor Phil Jones as “disgraced, FOI-breaching, email-deleting, scientific-method abusing”.  They explained that Professor Phil Jones had been exonerated of any dishonesty or scientific malpractice by a series of reviews.

Through its correspondence the newspaper had provided some evidence in support of the statements under dispute, and the columnist had included some of this evidence in the second blog post under discussion.  In relation to the columnist’s description of Professor Jones as “FOI-breaching, email-deleting”, the newspaper had provided extracts from an email from Professor Jones in which he had written “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone”, and another email in which he had written “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?”

With respect to the columnist’s assertion that Professor Jones was “scientific method-abusing”, the newspaper had provided an extract from an email from Professor Jones in which he had written “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline”.  In view of this, the Commission considered that there were some grounds for the columnist’s opinion – which readers would recognise was subjective – on these points.

But as Andrew Bolt says: I’m glad for James, but the problem is that even when you win, you lose. I can only guess at the stress and cost James has suffered. Who’d dare to go through that themselves?

Tim Ball faces legal action from Michael Mann

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Patrick Moore takes on another Greenpeace Guru

Patrick Moore was a co-founder of Greenpeace way back in 1971. He abandoned them in 1986 so he could pursue his environmental passions. As you would. Last November he published a tempting book: Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist. And not surprisingly stretched a few of his old friendships. The Vancouver Sun has a rare debate between Moore and Rex Weyler, another co-Founder (see below for a snippet). Predictably, Greenpeace is firing their best ad hom, and referring to him as a “paid spokesman for the Nuclear Industry” and are busy rewriting history. They used to list Moore as a co-Founder on their website in the past (copy here), but now they say that they were formed in 1970, and he joined it in 1971, “see the letter”. I did see the letter, and it seems “Greenpeace” didn’t quite mean the same thing in 1970.  What Moore joined in 1971 was a committee called, engagingly, “Don’t Make A Wave Committee” (I can see why that didn’t catch on) and it seems they had a boat called Greenpeace. He was also president of Greenpeace from 1977, and was even on the Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed in 1985. You’d think that would count for something. Patrick Moore is very much a skeptic

:

“We do not have any scientific proof that we are the cause of the global warming that has occurred in the last 200 years…The alarmism is driving us through scare tactics to adopt energy policies that are going to create a huge amount of energy poverty among the poor people. It’s not good for people and its not good for the environment…In a warmer world we can produce more food.”

He quit Greenpeace when they banned chlorine:

“The last straw was when Greenpeace decided to run with a global ban on chlorine. “This is when Greenpeace really lost me. As a student of advanced biochemistry, I realized chlorine was one of the 92 natural elements in the periodic table and that it is essential for life. You don’t just go around banning entire elements…”

Today he is chair and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. From the Vancouver Sun

Transcript: A heavy-weight bout between two founders of Greenpeace

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7.8 out of 10 based on 8 ratings

Greenpeace: witchhunters with $280m dollars to spend

UPDATE: It appears ANZ is not feeling apologetic or likely to cave in to green threats. ANZ chief executive Mike Smith, has delivered a savage attack on Julia Gillard, declaring her party was part of the “weak government club” of the world.

Greenpeace have produced a hit job on the ANZ Bank: a (fairly) slick production designed to seriously hurt the bank’s brand name, and to make it harder for coal miners to raise funds (which ultimately makes it harder for the poorest in society to pay their electricity bills).

This is why I insist:  Yes, this IS about the science. Even if we defeat the tax and trading scheme, as long as the public think “carbon is pollution” any honest business or business working with them will be subject to this bullying. Coal provides about three quarters of all Australian electricity. Yes, we need to get rid of the pollutants in coal production, but carbon dioxide is not one of them.

We are carbon life forms. There is no evidence that the climate models are right, and that CO2 emissions hurt the planet. Greenpeace could attack the coal industry because of poor safety standards, or because of other pollutants released, but instead they pursue their religious convictions. That’s why this is a witchhunt.

Greenpeace took in €200 million in 2009 (page 31 of their annual report) which is  $280m USD. They have become the big corporation they so despised. (And so much for transparency, there did not appear to be a list of contributors in the annual report).

In the end this kind of knifing could turn out to help us. After an attack like this, ANZ will be more open to hearing the other side of the science. Sooner or later the green elements will have made so many enemies that businesses and people everywhere will rise up to put an end to the intimidation based on assumptions, guesses, and predetermined conclusions.

h/t Gregory R

8.5 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

Poll Wars: Lying with loaded questions

The Carbon Tax is melting down Australian politics. The spin is running wild and the falsity of “carbon pollution” (sic) preys on yet another political leader.

Two polls met head to head today, one showing 59% of Australians don’t want the tax, and other saying that 72% of Australians want government to negotiate with Greens on the carbon levy. It’s a PR war out there, and, humans being gregarious creatures, every side wants to be in the majority — it’s a critical mass type of thing.

It’s easy to figure out which poll is closer to the truth.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) poll asked 550 adults the simple question:  “Thinking about the carbon tax. Are you in favour or against the introduction of a carbon tax in Australia?”. 59% were against, 13% didn’t know. Making it 72% who are not for it.

Meanwhile, proving that you can get almost any result you want on a poll if you ask the right questions, Galaxy Research asked 1036 people, the complex, loaded double whammy:

Thinking now about some federal issues. All sides of Australian politics agree that there is a need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to help address climate change. Do you believe that the best way to achieve this is to tax the big polluters or pay money to polluters to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions?

Support tax: 58%
Support paying polluters: 17%
Undecided: 25%

The poll tells us nothing about climate change but definitively shows 42% of the public are not fooled by loaded questions. What’s surprising is that only 58% support the idea of taking money from monstrous self serving polluters. I mean really, if there were polluters out there, surely everyone would tick that box? Why aren’t they in jail?

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8.2 out of 10 based on 5 ratings

Is man-made CO2 different? 1000 years? Try 4 years.

That CO2 you emitted last Tuesday: Is it coming back next month, next year, or in March 3011?

Tim Flannery makes it clear that CO2 circulates o-so-slowly, circa “a thousand years”. Remember that CO2’s “greenhouse” effect occurs at speed-of-light timescales, so if the temperature is affected, so must be the CO2 (according, at least, to the World of Flannery).

If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years… Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.  [Thanks to Andrew Bolt]

There are a few clues that maybe CO2 doesn’t idle the centuries away aloft, and that (I know you’ll be shocked) the Climate Commission (and IPCC) have overstated things: If emissions are absorbed by the global system in a matter of months, it rather blows the idea that we have to act decades ahead to stop the catastrophe. If CO2 levels adjust quickly, our “sins” will be much more quickly forgiven, and we can wait and see.

The thousand-year time frame doesn’t fit very well with NASA’s official carbon cycle and the empirical evidence.

You can see below in the NASA diagram that plants absorb 16% of all the carbon dioxide in the entire atmosphere each and every year (121 Gt of the 750 Gt in the air), and oceans absorb 12%, meaning that 28% of all the CO2 in the global atmosphere is sucked down each year. Let’s call it one quarter.

Global Carbon Cycle, NASA, Graphic, Natural Sources, Anthropogenic, Man-made, CO2, carbon dioxide, oceans, plants, biosphere.

In any given year, tens of billions of tons of carbon move between the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere. Human activities add about 5.5 billion tons per year of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The illustration above shows total amounts of stored carbon in black, and annual carbon fluxes in purple. (Illustration courtesy NASA Earth Science Enterprise^)

If a quarter of all atmospheric CO2 is being turned over each year, this implies that if humans found the Fountain of Endless Energy and stopped emitting any CO2 tomorrow, within just four years, only about 30% of that CO2 would remain. Indeed 90% of all the emissions that we’d ever put up there since Cheops built a pointy rock house* would be gone by 2020.

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8.5 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

40% of Australians don’t believe in man-made global warming (and boy are they irritated)

Who knew? CSIRO funded a 5,000 person poll last July and August and then sat on the results for months. Perhaps they were disappointed that only 50% of people thought humans have any role in changing the global climate? Worse, 90% of people acknowledge that the world is warming, and 40% have figured out that that the key issue is not whether it warms but whether it’s natural that matters, and it’s hard to call them deniers. How inconvenient.

Irritation hampers climate change science: The Australian, April 4 2011.

Poll of Australians, climate change irritates

Let me guess, Tim Flannery realizes that the more he explains the climate, in a one-sided staged discussion, the more people become skeptical, right? But then again, it could just be that the explanations are not credible. He’s closer than he realizes.

A lack of “credible information” is one of the main reasons that 40 per cent of Australians do not believe that humans have a role in global warming, according to the head of the federal government’s Climate Commission, Tim Flannery.

So despite a $100 million dollar federal department, a whole UN agency,  entire popular-science magazines being converted into full time activists, multiple glossy brochures, 13 million dollar advertising campaigns, community forums, school programs, teacher information, free school resources, and prime time media help on an almost daily basis, and Flannery still thinks the problem is that people lack “credible” information?

The real problem for Tim is that the people are getting too much of his kind of information. The more they get, the less they like it. Even without skeptics working online, the man-in-the-street knows that predicting the weather is damn difficult, the answers presented are too chumpy-chumpy clean cut, that there is no real debate, and any dissenters are marginalized and vilified (which is odd for a debate that is supposedly about science). The public can smell the propaganda. They are irritated by the one-sided fakery of the “conversation”.

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6 out of 10 based on 7 ratings

Flashback: France ditches carbon tax as protests mount

UPDATE: The French protests were 2010 news (and have been rediscovered around the web). H/t Jeremy C and David for pointing out the date, for a couple of hours I thought it was 2011 news. It’s an apt time to remind everyone in Australia of yet another country that isn’t rushing to become “carbon free”. It’s a rather prophetic warning to the Gillard Government, especially since the NSW landslide election against the Labor Party last weekend is still being analyzed and viewed increasingly as a “seismic event” in Australian politics.

——–

The economic reality of big-debts, and poor decisions made by people spending “other people’s money” always hurts in the long run. Sooner or later it all ends in tears. It’s a common theme: there were deadly protests in Greece, then these French protests in March 2010, and this March, the mass London protests with 250,000 people. Civil unrest is coming.

From The Telegraph and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, March 2010:

President Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday scrapped the country’s proposed carbon tax and reshuffled his cabinet in populist tilt after suffering a crushing electoral defeat over the weekend, when his Gaulliste UMP arty lost every region other than in its bastion of Alsace and the Indian Ocean island of Reunion.

The greens were dismayed but business was relieved:

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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

Scary Exaggerations Unfounded


GUEST POST: Dr David Evans and Professor Bob Carter

Their Latest Scary Forecast

The latest from the Climate Commission is very, very scary:

[I just love this graph. It’s so over-the-top, it’s like a “Pepsi-climate” ad -JN]

Flannery, Climate Commission, Scary, Graph,

They reckon we have to stabilize carbon dioxide emissions immediately or we’ll fry. But these forecasts are based solely on what are essentially the same faulty climate models as in 1988, and are similarly exaggerated.

Their Earlier Scary Forecast Was Bunk

U.S. government climate scientists started the climate scare with a forecast  to the U.S. Congress in 1988 which was based on climate models. Here it is, with the actual temperature that eventuated later added in red:

Hansen, 1988, forecast, projection, compared to UAH 2010

Hansen, 1988, forecast, projection, compared to UAH 2010

Source

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6.6 out of 10 based on 8 ratings

Prof Vincent Courtillot speaks with clarity

I’m traveling at the moment, in Darwin tonight. I can’t really comment on the hot-bed of climate action that Australia is right now, but instead this is something from afar that caught my eye a few days ago.

Video’s bore me usually, but I enjoyed watching Courtillot — he’s possibly the clearest, fastest, crispest speaker I’ve ever heard, and it’s all the more amazing because he speaks with an accent. Don’t misunderstand — there are no jokes, no satire, and no punch lines here, just an honest summary of the state of the current scientific play, especially with his synopsis of the cosmic ray theory. (He is a colleague of Nir Shaviv).

Usually I find speakers are too slow, but Courtillot packs the words in, without overstatement or monotony. He’s is a smart man who knows his topic well and it’s unusually obvious.

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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

The Tyranny grinds on: Update on the Thompsons

Background: Can a Western Government wipe out an honest business with red tape? (What a naive question…)

Janet and Matt Thompson

Matt and Janet spoke out as skeptics in May 2007 and their life savings and business are now at grave risk as they fight off bankruptcy. What has undone them is not the financial crisis, or any failure of their business, but impossible clauses and conditions. Indeed they were so profitable in 2007 they were turning away business. They’ve broken no laws, are popular with their nearest neighbors, 6000 odour tests showed there was little problem in the town, and the Thompsons complied with every departmental request to manage the farm. Yet licensing changes and new conditions were so onerous, that banks won’t loan money against the license (it’s not much of a licence). Clause A1 means their licence can be whipped away again at any time if they “offend” anyone anywhere or interfere with their “health and comfort”. How do we measure that — Let the loudest complainer win. (If complaints about “comfort” can shut down a business, there go the wind farms…. Why is there one rule for one business, but not for all?) Even the department (DEC) admits it broke it’s own normal procedures and treated them unfairly. The operations manager of Narrogin Beef committed suicide, and the Thompsons have been reduced to the last thread as they pin their hopes on the difficult task of suing the Western Australian Department of Environment and Conservation in the Federal Court.

The Thompson’s information page.

D-Day on the decision in the Federal Court is Friday April 1. Though if they win, it means they have the right to sue the Department, not that past injustices will be righted on the spot. This is a long road ahead.
Matt and Janet write:

“Thanks to all who have supported us in so many ways. We have managed to stay on our property and fight for our rights legally since this all came to a head last September.

The legal process is very difficult, expensive, and cumbersome. However, we have managed to fight off a series of minor skirmishes and will finally be presenting the main body of our case for the first time before a federal court Judge in Perth on Friday April 1. This hearing will not be the end, but it will set important directions.

Joshua Forrester of Ranger Legal in Perth, and Peter King QSC Sydney are acting on our behalf.
The bottom line is that when all this went public on the sites last year we had been asked by the receivers to prepare to leave by October 15. The public outcry and the actions of our solicitors have so far prevented the other side from gaining possession and kicking us out. However, we have been unable to earn income by operating our facility in the meantime while the case is pending for legal reasons.

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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Lewandowsky bitten by a hoax

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky may not understand much about the climate, but he is a professor of psychology — so satire, humor, and hoaxes ought to be right up his alley, right?  He’s realized he fell for the brilliant Alene Composta (a master satirist) replying to her and even sending her fake request for advice to fellow blogger John Cook (who fell for it too).

Alene ticked all the headline stereotypical victim-leftie boxes, her interests included “christine milne”, “organic gardening” and “batik hangings” and lets face it, “Composta” is a red flag, rather. So she wrote to Lewandowsky begging for advice in dealing with monster commenters from Bolt and Blair, and notably pointed to him surviving my scorn and ridicule:

I recently began blogging, especially about climate change, and after a month my site was noticed. Noticed by the wrong people, sadly. Readers of Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt have swamped my site with genuinely abusive comments, many relating to my disability, which I find very hurtful.

So my question to you is this: How do you deal with monsters like this?

I have read and savoured every column you have published at Unleashed, and I have read the hateful comments that, even with an ABC moderator to vet them, still make it up on the site. The worst charge is that they simply do not take me seriously, which diminishes me in my humanity. I must confess that, after the latest round of abuse, I hugged my little cat and cried for an hour.

You have not only shrugged off that abuse, you have also survived the scorn and ridicule of your fellow West Australian Joanne Nova (I found that while googling your email address). It is a species of bravery I do not know if I can tap.
I’m a fragile woman and I thought my blog, Verdant Hopes, might be a force for good in the world. Instead it has made me a victim once again.

He replied, soaking it all up. In a bold twist reminiscent of Soviet psychologists, he called the skeptics “bullies” and the attacks “orchestrated”:

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9.3 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

130,000 Australians say No Carbon Tax, Greens flop, Labor issues biblical scare campaign

What a week downunder, just in case you missed it.

We’re a nation, up in arms. With three months til G-Day (when the Greens control the Senate on July 1) and the tax-based-on-a-lie likely to become legislation, the heat is on. Protests and smears are running strong. Forces are being mobilized, and people are being polarized. Yet the public is abandoning the carbon tax, and the parties who promote it.

As the mass rally movements begin the Big Scare Campaign fans responded with smears to paint the rally-goers as extreme fringe, loonies and nutters. The fringe in this case turns out to be 4 out of 5 people.  Who are the “deniers”? When asked, do you support the carbon tax? One hundred and thirty thousand people said NO.

83% of the Channel  Nine poll don’t want a carbon tax.

The Labor Party sent out biblical climate speaking notes to all it’s ministers the floods and droughts are coming, oceans will rise up and wash away your home, there will be burning bushes, and the storms will kill your firstborn (or words to that effect). And they howl about Abbot running a fear campaign. Wait for the advice about the seven plagues of locusts. It’s coming.

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6.4 out of 10 based on 5 ratings

David Evans, Carbon Accounting Modeler, Says It’s a Scam

Dr David Evans’ address to the Anti-Carbon-Tax rally, Perth Australia, 23 March 2011.

Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen.

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence,  was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools and liars out of our politicians.

Let’s set a few things straight.

The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now cheat and lie outrageously to maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.

Let’s be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.

Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.

The disagreement comes about what happens next.

The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.

This is the core idea of every official climate model: for each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three – so two thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors), only one third is due to extra carbon dioxide.

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6.9 out of 10 based on 7 ratings

We are being deceived

Perth Protest Anti Carbon Tax Rally

Perth Protest Anti Carbon Tax Rally

My speech at the Anti-tax Carbon rally, Wednesday March 23rd.

I used to be a Green. I used to think Carbon dioxide mattered. I still worry about falling fish stocks, old growth forest and erosion, but wind farms won’t help the fish, and solar cells won’t keep the top soil from blowing away. Real environmental  problems are being sidelined by fake ones.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I thought I was well informed, but I was shocked when I found out how what was going on behind the scenes. Everything you may have heard about carbon dioxide can be turned inside out.

How many excuses does it take?

  • CO2 feeds plants. It’s the only” pollution” pumped onto farms to grow food. Did you know plant life goes dormant if CO2 falls too low? Farmers don’t just pump in an extra 5 or 10% either, they ramp up the concentration 4 or 5 fold in greenhouses. Did the government scientists forget to mention that?
  • Australia is the largest exporter of coal in the world. But did they say that China digs up nearly 10 times more coal than we do?
  • The famous ice core graphs of Al Gore — expanded to 20 meters square — turned out to show the opposite of what he claimed. Temperatures drive carbon and lead it by 800 years. Worse,iIt was well known, and not contested two years before he made his movie.
  • Global warming stopped, and none of the models predicted that.
  • The endless droughts — ended.
  • All that CO2 and Global storms hit their lowest level for 30 years.
  • And you have to wonder: nearly 90% of the thermometers in the US are too close to artificial heat sources. 90%. How much do the climate science team care about the science?
  • 75% of thermometers used in the 1980’s have dropped off the official record. All that money, and less instruments to measure with…
  • They adjust the data — sometimes 50 years after it was recorded. Think about that. The 1970’s kept warming for the next 30 years.
  • 3000 ocean buoys looked and couldn’t find most of the missing heat that our planet is supposed to be storing.
  • 6000 boreholes tell us the world was warmer 1000 years ago, and even warmer again 5000 years ago. None of the models can explain that.
  • all the models predict a hot spot, and 28 million weather balloons can’t find it;
  • 31,500 scientists don’t think we need a carbon tax. That includes 9000 phd’s. There’s a grassroots revolt going on out there. This was done by volunteers, and done twice. There’s never been another petition like it in science, ever. Did the media forget to tell you that too?
  • For every dollar paid to a skeptic, big government paid 3500 to global warmers.

It’s a topsy-turvey world out there:

We all have better things to do than come along today, but when the people who represent us call fertilizer “pollution”, and label the volunteers “stooges”, while they call the paid hacks “independent”; when they look at a color chart and say yellow is red, … and they call us “deniers”…

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8.9 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

Thousands of angry ordinary Australians turn up and alarmist smears begin

In Canberra today over 3,000 people went out of their way, coming in on 30 buses from more than 1000 km away, to let Julia Gillard know that Australians do not want her Carbon Tax. The news made every major broadcast for several minutes. Protesters were referred to as “climate skeptics” (mostly).

Other rallies around Australia got hundreds of people even though they were organized in a hurry, with no advertising, and with no pre-formed coalition of networked groups. There was a very good crowd at the Perth rally on a hot day during business hours, and one heckler (John Brookes). The mood was striking.

This is random shoe-string grassroots action at the last minute and look what it can achieve. It’s just beginning.

The photo gallery at the Australian makes it clear how decidedly normal most people were and what their main messages are.

This is mainstream Australia rising up, yet already the Big-Green-PR machine is at work, doing all it can to deny the undeniable. As I drove home in Perth after our rally, ABC news-radio didn’t mention that 3,000 people had gathered, nor that protests had happened all over the country, they may have said that earlier, but all I heard was how Tony Abbot was under a “cloud” for having spoken at a rally with “extremists” — The Telegraph headlined it too. Labor MP Nick Champion, Labor Party backbencher, gets press time for for his free shot at calling them “extremists“. It’s just another form of name-calling, and if the media had any standards they would not propagate the namecalling without demanding he substantiate it. (Do write and tell me if any journalist asked Champion to explain why it’s extreme to ask for major policies to be put to an election first, or why we ought to expect some achievable outcome when we pay billions  — other than earning brownie-points for the UN). Does the word “extreme” mean anything?

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8.5 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

Was 2010 the hottest ever?

Was 2010 “the hottest year ever” as the PR machine repeats ad nauseum? Yes — but only if you ignore three of the four main global datasets and those awkward questions about why nobody thought to put thermometers in better places.

Run your eyes down this page to see how the GISS temperatures pan out compared to all the other compilations. This is James Hansen’s group, and GISS stands for the Goddard Institute of Space Studies — and in the topsy-turvey world of climate change, that’s apt — the space centre and hot bed of rocketry calculates world temperatures by ignoring  … satellites. For GISS, measuring the world temperature, calls for irregularly spaced, unique, non-standardized temperature stations (sometimes near air-conditioning vents and concrete). And no sir, not the satellites that scan the Earth 24 hours a day, over land and sea, and which are usually not too close to exhaust vents, or buildings, or (thank goodness) fermenting vats of sewage either.

So, indeed, the only sane answer to the cherry picking crowd who crow triumphantly about their outlying most favorite result, is that “No” 2010 was not hotter than 1998, not according to the satellites. And even if it had been, the world was warmer for most of the Holocene. Get over it.

*PS: People still write to me and ask me how to reply to the oft repeated line about 2010. It’s also handy to mention that the world has been warming since before Napolean bought all those SUV’s. (The warming started before our emissions became significant, and at least since measurements began, the trend hasn’t changed and the models don’t know why. We also discussed this point in the here too, with other graphs.)

PPS: Vote here on the word “denier”, the ABC is wondering. (Thanks Bernd)

The four big temperature sets

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8.2 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

Yes, it IS about the science

Behind-the-scenes I’ve heard the line this “isn’t about the science”. I said that myself back in 2007: it’s not about the science, it’s about power and money. But it’s a dangerous meme. In the long run, it IS about the science.

While people think a carbon tax is bad, but believe that “carbon is pollution”, we have won a battle but lost the war.

Many new folk are appearing on the anti-carbon tax team, and here’s the weird thing for we seasoned skeptics, some of these oppose the tax, yet “believe” the science (?!) “It’s too hard” they say. They seem to think if we just beat the tax, we can ignore the reason the tax is supposedly there in the first place.

The science is the whole official reason for the tax, and if we don’t force the crowds to notice the corruption, the cheating, and the way science is exploited, then we are asking to be bludgeoned with it again. We are letting the most outrageous scam-meisters leave the room with their reputations intact and asking to be victims of the next invented crisis.

Some anti-carbon-taxers say, “Don’t confuse the punters”, just stick to the economics. And don’t misunderstand me, that’s the top-ranking point, and I’m the one who posted the definitive IPCC most generous temperature calculation, and said this is a knockout blow. But the war on our civilization is so much bigger than just one battle over one piece of legislation.

Science might seem hard to explain, but you don’t need a PhD to understand cheating. People know that publicly funded scientists ought not hide publicly funded information, and dodge FOI’s. They know that thermometers don’t measure global warming when they’re five feet above concrete, or next to warming air conditioner exhausts. They know that if carbon rises after temperatures, Mr Al Gore was not giving them the full story.

They need to know they are being deceived

While people think a carbon tax is bad, but believe that “carbon is pollution”, we have won a battle but lost the war. It’s not much of an achievement to stop this tax, but leave intact the infrastructure, the departments, the associations, and the dismal standards in our schools, newspapers, and ABC. As long as enviro-activists-masquerading-as-journo’s are the only ones explaining “science”, the West will be weakened and real environmental problems will go ignored. Until we get logic and reason into our universities and public discussion, the bullying, name-calling, distracting, and intimidation will still win debates before they even begin.

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4 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Way back when climate scientists were scientists: Chapter 8, FAR, circa 1990

You’ll find this hard to believe but I get excited about the 1990 First Assessment Report (FAR). It’s very different from wading through the later ones, because it’s remarkably honest, and things are not hidden in double-speak (well, not so much). Scientists behave like scientists and talk of null hypothesis, and even of validating models. Indeed they had a whole chapter back then called “validation”. How times have changed.

This is the short summary of Chapter 8 “Attribution”

Thanks to Alan for sending me this link today (Chapter 8, IPCC FAR).

The “Attribution” Chapter is the part where they try to figure out what “caused” the warming. Chapter 8 says, essentially, “we don’t know, we might never know, our models don’t work, and we can conclude it might all be natural, but then again, it might not.” Got it?

This is in the same era that Al Gore was saying “the science is settled” and “there is no debate”.

What’s clear in 1990 from the FAR was that it was widely admitted that the models were bodgy, and that figuring out exactly what caused the recent warming was very difficult, indeed impossible at the time. There were too many variables, the signal to noise ratio was awful. There were almost no singularly unique points which the enhanced greenhouse effect would produce that we could use to definitively say “Gotcha!”.

Unlike today, when Professors of Climatism repeat “there is no doubt global warming is real” as if it meant something, back then they knew it didn’t.

“Global mean warming for example is not a particularly good signal in this sense because there are many possible causes of such warming.”

Mind you, even in 1990, they try it on anyway, just to see how it looks.

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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings