Recent Posts
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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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Thursday
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Oxfam have produced a political program that reaches into Australian, UK, and New Zealand schools under the guise of “climate science”. There are petitions for children to send to the PM. Law abiding corporations are called “polluting vested interests”. Kids are now advising the government on energy policy and economic direction, and NGOs, which are partly funded by Big-Government, are effectively telling kids to vote for Big-Government. Anyone spot the conflict of interest?
Tony Thomas has been reading up on Oxfam Australia, and lays out their most “activist” messages below. According to Oxfam, it reaches some 100,000 children in Australian schools. In the UK over 2,000 schools in England and 550 in Scotland are part of the “Global Learning Program” and English schools get “up to £500 of e-credits” which schools can use to pay for CPD”. CPD for those of us non-UK types is “Continuing Professional Development”. Perhaps the English readers can tell us a bit more, but it sounds like Oxfam and Big-Gov-UK are working hand-in-hand.
Oxfam has a “whole school approach” which means in-school and after-school activities, as well as teacher training and curriculum development. It’s “holistic”, which means it promotes global citizenship and everything except for Western culture, Western industry, free markets, and taxpayers (who help fund it). It’s more about sustainability of activism, not sustainability of civilizations.
Roughly 30% of Oxfam Australia’s total income comes from government grants. I’m sure Oxfam staff sincerely believe in the climate religion, but I’m also sure there is no incentive for them to find holes in an idea which helps get left wing Big-Government parties elected who are less likely to cut the “Foreign Aid” budget. They keep the lobbyists and bureaucrats in office who support NGOs. Plus it’s a smart “business plan” to reach out to future donors. Presumably any Oxfam staff member who pointed out how carbon trading feeds big bankers, increased corruption, and did nothing for the poor and the environment would be uninvited to drinks after work. Forgive my cynicism, but the day Oxfam points out that windfarms and solar cells won’t change the weather is the day I might believe they care more about humanity than their own tribe.
What’s the answer? Before kids get fed politics, they need to be taught logic and reason. In schools, the rightful place for Oxfam material is as fodder for debates and analysis but children need to be trained to spot propaganda. Principals and Oxfam need to feel the heat. In it’s own words Oxfam’s grand plan is to redirect itself more to “influence authorities”, and “redistribute wealth” and less to “deliver services”. They are becoming a nakedly political outfit. — Jo
 Save the world with motherhood statements? Oxfam rams its climate scares into classrooms
By Tony Thomas
Oxfam Australia is yet another climate-catastrophe spruiker to be welcomed into classrooms along with Cool Australia, Greenpeace, Australian Conservation Foundation, WWF, Australian Youth Climate Coalition and Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth teams. But Oxfam is successfully carving out its own territory in the intra-green competition for children’s souls.
The 2013-14 Oxfam Australia annual report says more than 20,000 teachers used Oxfam resources to teach 100,000 students. And more than 6800 students in high schools and universities took part in 40 Oxfam workshops to help them become discussion leaders among their peers.
Oxfam resources specifically for schools
At a glance, Oxfam appears even more politically partisan than the other groups. It cites “great examples of the myriad ways schools can make a difference” and directs students to its “Take Action” page,
“Tell the PM to be the Australian leader we need. Demand he goes to New York and commits in person to the new UN #GlobalGoals for Sustainable Development.”
Take Action also says, below a caricature of Prime Minister Tony Abbott holding an umbrella against a cyclone, and alongside a political petition:
“So far, the Abbott Government has absolutely failed the climate leadership test. Email our political leaders now. Tell them you’re searching for someone to step up and lead Australia on climate..
Tell them that Australians want a bold and visionary government that’s prepared to make the right choice. For everyone, not just for polluting vested interests.
Take action now!”
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9.2 out of 10 based on 71 ratings
The best of BBC science reporting. Actress cum climate scientist, Emma Thompson, predicts that Arctic drilling will cause 4 degrees of global temperature rise by 2030, 15 years hence. The BBC reporter, Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis, trained with the best of BBC science and journalism, lets it pass.
Obviously, we’ve reached a tipping point — in journalistic standards. If a Nobel Prize winning physicist said that “warming may be natural”, BBC journalists are trained to point out he is not a climate scientist. But if an actress predicts Armageddon, the nation needs to know.
Perhaps Arctic drilling will unleash global magma?
 165 years of global warming is about to hit escape velocity At least one climate scientist is not going to let nonsense be broadcast without protest. Where are the others?
David Rose, Daily Mail
One of Britain’s top climate scientists has launched a blistering attack on actress Emma Thompson and the BBC, accusing them of ‘scaremongering’ over the speed of global warming – and risking a worsening of the refugee crisis. Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the Met Office and a professor at Exeter University, launched his attack on Twitter about an interview Ms Thompson gave to Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis last Wednesday. He followed it up with a longer critique – an extract of which this newspaper publishes today – on the website of HELIX, a prestigious EU-wide climate research programme which he also directs.
Lucky the UK still had a private press to clean up the mistakes of the publicly funded media.
Jeremy Corbyn (likely to be the next UK Labor leader) suggests that British Taxpayers should be able to opt out of funding the army. Jo Nova suggests this is an excellent principle, and British Taxpayers should be able to opt out of funding the BBC too. (And welfare, public health, public education, research into psychology, subsidies for renewables, the list goes on.)
Taking this idea further, those who opt out of being protected by the Army can set up their own defense force. The alternate army could conscript from those who opted out. Or the regular Army could conscript those who didn’t pay, in the event of an invasion.
H/t GWPF
9.3 out of 10 based on 105 ratings
The agenda is relentless
Look at the list of meetings being held (below) — last week, officials were in Bonn, “clarifying the options”, and they have another five-day session in October. On top of that ministers from 60 nations will meet for “this Sunday and Monday”. On Sept 27 a luncheon in New York has been added onto the UN General Assembly (is that the emergency meeting Ban Ki Moon called last week, or something else as well?). After that foreign ministers are meeting in Lima. This is global wheeling and dealing with big power and money at stake. (If only the UN cared as much about poverty and disease, imagine what they could do?).
The global headlines are a perfect PR mix of contradiction
This weekend in the media the road to Paris is described both as stalled at a frustrating “snails pace” and with “hints of progress“. It’s a stalemate, which also is “starting to take shape“. The UN bureaucrats would be happy with that. If headlines were too confident everyone relaxes, gets bored and moves on, and if headlines are dire, everyone gives up. The name of the PR game is to keep the spectators focused. It needs to be like the final set of Wimbledon with the result close but in doubt til that last game.
Whatever happens in Paris, I predict that when it ends, the PR will say the agreement was a “breakthrough”. It will also say “it’s not enough”. This is in keeping with the spirit of everlasting continuation. Ideally the problem will never be solved but hover in a perpetual state of tipping. No matter what we do, the gravy train will want more.
How much do they need to change the weather? As much as we can give. They will take until the protests hit “that point”.
AFP: “Not repeating the mistakes of Copenhagen” is a common refrain at the talks in Bonn, and something of a mantra for the organisers of the November 30-December 11 conference in the French capital.
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9.1 out of 10 based on 82 ratings
One for the geologists. It took twenty years, so this was the slowest “CT” scan ever done. They used seismic waves from Earthquakes and “numerical simulations” (and we know what they are). But possibly these models are not worthless. Apparently these blobs of hot rock under the Pacific and Africa are 5,000 km across, and may have been there for 250 million years. In any case, the full press release is below. There’s no mention of heat that might be coming up from this big ball of magma and how that might influence ocean currents, or whether it even changes on a timescale that matters (Hey we have one “CT” scan. We can’t get a trend from that. I just wonder… — Jo
 .. CT scan of Earth links deep mantle plumes with volcanic hotspots
[Science Daily] Scans prove that plumes of hot rock anchored at core-mantle boundary rise to form island chains
University of California, Berkeley, seismologists have produced for the first time a sharp, three-dimensional scan of Earth’s interior that conclusively connects plumes of hot rock rising through the mantle with surface hotspots that generate volcanic island chains like Hawaii, Samoa and Iceland.
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8.7 out of 10 based on 55 ratings
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8.5 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
Yale scientist’s big new advance is to find the 2,600 billion trees humankind had not known about. Before now, 82% of the Earth’s trees were not counted, unknown, missing. This increases the tally of known trees by 7.5-fold. Phew. They reckon there are now 3.04 trillion trees, or roughly 422 trees per person.
They also estimate that humans have deforested exactly 46% of the trees on the planet in the last 12,000 years. (How fortunate that tree density estimates and satellite records are still available from 10,000 BC.) Presumably, the human deforestation factor is around 46% plus or minus 100%. Pick a number. Spin the wheel.
The idea was dumb enough to be produced by Yale and published in Nature.
Seeing the forest and the trees, all three trillion of them
A new Yale-led study estimates that there are more than 3 trillion trees on Earth, about seven and a half times more than some previous estimates. But the total number of trees has plummeted by roughly 46 percent since the start of human civilization, the study estimates.
Using a combination of satellite imagery, forest inventories, and supercomputer technologies, the international team of researchers was able to map tree populations worldwide at the square-kilometer level.
Their results, published in the journal Nature, provide the most comprehensive assessment of tree populations ever produced and offer new insights into a class of organism that helps shape most terrestrial biomes.
Next thing you know they’ll tell us to set up a global market in the carbon embedded in trees…
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9.1 out of 10 based on 75 ratings
It’s a science debate, and Suzuki pops up again, as he does periodically, with innuendo, namecalling and feets of logic. (He’s reasoning with both feet.) He’s not even offering well researched ad hom attacks. They’re not only irrelevant and unscientific, they’re wrong too.
On June 18, Suzuki told us that irrational attacks diminished the debate. On Sept 1, Suzuki is firing fallacies, no data, no research, no reasoning.
He laments that political leaders are not gullibly swept away (as he is) by baseless rumours, ad hominem attacks and articles in The Guardian. I can’t think why myself, but Suzuki explains, with his science guru hat on, that there is an”enormous” amount of fossil fuel funding, which is also secretive and unrevealed. I guess he’s putting his psychic powers to the test. Who needs evidence or sources anymore?
Suzuki really unleashes his full fantasy ad hom. Fossil fuels are funding practically every player in the US, UK and Canada: Heartland, GWPF, ICSC. Even the unfunded, volunteer run, Watts Up is an “industry funded website” – I bet Anthony Watts can’t wait for those cheques to start arriving. (Neither can I). For the record, Climate Depot gets 80% of it’s support from citizens. It has thousands of supporters.
Deniers are all over the map; climate realists all over the world, David Suzuki, National Observer
“Part of the problem is that fossil fuel interests spend enormous amounts of money to sow doubt and confusion, often by funding or setting up organizations like the Heartland Institute in the U.S., the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the U.K., Ethical Oil and Friends of Science in Canada and the International Climate Science Coalition, based in this country but affiliated with similar organizations in Australia and New Zealand and with close ties to Heartland. A number of industry-funded websites also promote fossil fuels at the expense of human life, including Climate Depot and Watts Up With That?”
This line of attack is so old, it’s like Suzuki got trapped in 2007, but the world moved on. When Suzuki finds out that Royal Dutch Shell has been lobbying against coal, funding “progressive” think tanks, and promoting carbon capture, he’s in for a headache. When he finds out Exxon paid four times more to the Stanford Global Climate and Energy project, than they every gave to “deniers” he’ll have to become a skeptic.
Someone needs to tell Suzuki that “fossil fuels” are not just one industry, with one union and one big chumpy PR office, but industries called coal, oil, gas, and shale, and they all compete with each other. Big-Oil and Big-Gas like the anti-CO2 message because it hurts Big-Coal, their main competitor. Big-Gas like wind farms, because they are useless erratic things, and any country afflicted with them needs gas powered turbines. But the world is such a complicated place.
All skeptics are wrong because they don’t all say the same thing?
Apparently skeptics have been falsified because thousands of independent unfunded people cannot agree on one single theory. They should only have one permitted opinion, (like believers do, right, because that’s how science advances, one dogma at a time?):
In a Guardian article, co-author Dana Nuccitelli said their study found “no cohesive, consistent alternative theory to human-caused global warming.” Instead, “Some blame global warming on the sun, others on orbital cycles of other planets, others on ocean cycles, and so on.”
A consensus is profoundly unscientific, and Suzuki ferments that fallacy. Argument from authority, here we come:
Nuccitelli and fellow researchers Rasmus Benestad, Stephan Lewandowsky, Katharine Hayhoe, Hans Olav Hygen, Rob van Dorland and John Cook note that about 97 per cent of experts worldwide agree on a cohesive, science-based theory of global warming, but those who don’t “are all over the map, even contradicting each other. The one thing they seem to have in common is methodological flaws like cherry picking, curve fitting, ignoring inconvenient data, and disregarding known physics.”
Cook found 64 papers out of 12,000 that support the consensus. In Cook-calculations, 64 is 97% of 12,000 (when will Environ Res Letters retract it?). Believers not only cherry pick, ignore thousands of observations, but they are also bad at maths. There is no inconvenient data that skeptics “ignore”, there is only adjustimongered data that no one can recognise, and inconvenient data that believers won’t give to skeptics.
As David Suzuki said on June 18th 2015:
Canadians must continue to speak out for our water, land, air and wildlife, for justice for Indigenous Peoples, and for a clean energy future — without fear of harassment, intimidation and hatred.
Exactly. So when will David Suzuki stop calling dedicated scientists “deniers” and inventing fantasy claims about their motives and funding? If skeptics have got the science wrong, just explain it Dr Suzuki. There is not one single word of scientific truth in that article.
Suzuki explains how hard it is to be an activist:
…environmental advocacy has never been easy. As Heiltsuk community organizer and First Nations leader Jess Housty says, “Activism is hard. It pits you against forces that have a lot at stake, and who fight dirty and bite back hard.
I’ve spoken to thousands of environmental and community activists during many years of meeting with Canadians across this country. I’ve heard too many stories of people being harassed, ostracized, sued for standing up to large corporations and even fired from jobs because of their environmental advocacy.”
It’s true, it’s hard being a science advocate. We keep having to explain what logical fallacies are and whatthe scientific method is to people with PhD’s in environmental religions.
For the record, Climate Depot, Marc Morano and CFACT are mostly funded by concerned citizens. I asked Marc, and he replied:
“In its most recent 2014 annual report, CFACT reported that it had received 80% of its annual budget from citizen supporters, 16% from foundations, and 4% from corporations. It is not CFACT’s policy to identify particular sources of funding.
However, we can also report that the Climate Hustle film project has been funded 100% by the support of nearly 1,500 private individuals.”
The reason they, like Heartland, no longer discuss particular sources of funding is because of harassment by environmental activists who think views should be shouted down with innuendo and attacks rather than debated politely.
Once upon a time, when I was training in science communication, we went and saw David Suzuki “live” because he was held up as a prime example of what we should be when we grew up, so to speak. That tells you all you need to know about how immature the field is.
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9.6 out of 10 based on 150 ratings
Give us our junkets, and forgive us our flights. We’re here to save the world.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon just announced plans to invite 40 world leaders to a “closed shop” climate meeting in just four weeks time. How often does that happen?
UN summons leaders to closed-door climate change meeting
Frustrated by slow progress in global climate talks, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon plans to invite around 40 world leaders including President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to a closed- door meeting next month.
The meeting will take place in New York on September 27, a day ahead of the UN general assembly, said three people with knowledge of the matter. Ban also plans to invite French President Francois Hollande, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, as well as Chinese leaders, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorised to speak to the media.
The bonanza of money and power on offer in Paris is so large that nothing will be left to chance. The industry is worth $1.5 trillion a year already. Laws about energy use cut across every part of the free economy. It’s a bureaucrat’s wet-dream — allowing them to feed dependent corporate friends and sympathetic NGOs at the same time as handing out free passes to pollute to supporters and waving the same passes as leverage over enemies.
The UNFCCC in Copenhagen in 2009,was a debacle, and they are not going to make that mistake twice. The fact that countries have already publicly locked in emissions cuts is part of the massive preparation for Paris. This new “closed door” meeting is presumably to strengthen the networks of those who are on the climate-gravy-train, and to tighten the thumbscrews on those who are not. The last minute meeting may be a sign things are not going well for Big-Bureaucracy, but then again, perhaps this meeting was on their agenda all along. Who knows? Is there anyone that could be FOI’d in the UN? No, just send in your money, no accountability required, no public witnesses wanted, no transparency on offer. Does the UN have a well-deserved reputation for corruption? Give us our junkets, and forgive us our flights. We’re here to save the world.
India is not going to cut back on coal:
Power Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday said coal-based thermal power will remain the staple power source for India and denounced Western concerns over climate and environmental hazards.
Nor is China, which will not do any serious reductions until 2030 when its rapidly growing population stabilizes. Five of the G7 nations have increased their coal use.
Skeptics must work together
If independent, free states were even remotely organized they would be holding their own networking sessions right now. There is no sign they are. Make sure your ministers and representatives know what’s coming. Big carrots and sticks will be offered to cajole nations to join in the parasitic, pointless money grab. If there is an international “targeted” punishment system in place (as Warwick University researchers recommended), I doubt it will be announced publicly but done with plausible deniability behind “closed doors”. The only defense is preparation. Skeptical free nations must stand together. Divided they will fall one by one to the self-feeding system of collectivist big-government pressure.
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9.5 out of 10 based on 125 ratings
Was that a half-truth or a lie by omission? Trick question…
Malcolm Kendrick reports on a new study that he says should “shake the foundations of medical research” but laments that it almost certainly won’t.
In the year 2000, the US National Heart Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) insisted that all researchers register their “primary aim” and then later their “primary outcome” with clinicaltrials.gov. This one small change in the way medical studies were reported transformed the “success” rates in peer reviewed papers. Before 2000, fully 57% of studies found the success they said they were testing for, but after that, their success rate fell to to a dismal 8%. When people didn’t have to declare what their aim was, they could fish through their results to find some positive, perhaps tangential association, and report that as if they had been investigating that effect all along. The negative results became invisible. If a diet, drug or treatment showed no benefit at all, or turned up bad results, nobody had to know.
The world of peer reviewed climate research: like a universe of dark matter
It’s not like climate science suffers from unpublished “negative results” — no, it’s more like it’s built on them: like all the model runs that ran off the ranch and disappeared, and the hot spot that never went missing, but keeps being “found”. The infamous Pause in the Climate barely existed until a forest of explanations for it appeared. Then there are the strange missing proxies — like the tree rings from the last 30 years. Did no one look, have all the trees gone, or were those awkward results dropped down the memory hole? Or is it because when someone did, the proxy turns out to be useless like the Sheep Mountain hockey-stick tree rings did?
Without a hypothesis, research isn’t science, just a glorified PR machine.
Malcolm Kendrick:
A group of researchers recently looked at 55 large clinical studies funded by the NHLBI between 1970 and 2012 to see if the transparency rules had made any difference. What they found should shake the foundations of medical research…but it almost certainly won’t:
- 57% of studies (17/30) published before 2000 showed a significant benefit in the primary outcome
- 8% (2/25 trials published after 2000 showed a significant benefit in the primary outcome
As the researchers said ‘The requirement of prospective registration in ClinicalTrials.gov is most strongly associated with the trend towards null clinical trials. The prospective declaration of the primary outcome variable required when registering trials may eliminate the possibility of researchers choosing to report on other measures included in a study. Almost half of the trials [published after 2000] might have been able to report a positive result if they had not declared a primary outcome in advance.1’
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9.6 out of 10 based on 75 ratings
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8 out of 10 based on 29 ratings
Renewable power is always as “cheap as coal” except when subsidies are slashed, then it’s “the end”, “terrible”, and “fragile”.
If only renewable power could actually compete with coal.
Greenclick tells us the UK solar industry is “reeling” in “shock and anger” as the UK conservative government cuts the renewables feed-in tariff there by as much as 86%. Even for the hydro industry (about the only renewable industry that can survive on its own), the news could spell the “end”.
Joss Blamire, Senior Policy Manager at Scottish Renewables, which represents more than 300 green energy businesses , said: “The proposals in the Comprehensive Feed-in Tariff Review are, quite simply, terrible news for homeowners, businesses, communities and those local authorities which have plans in place to develop renewable energy schemes.
“The levels of reduction in support announced today will severely curtail development of small-scale onshore wind and solar projects and endanger jobs and investments across the country.
“The cuts could also spell the end for much of the hydro industry, which has enjoyed a recent renaissance but relies more heavily on Government support because of the length of time taken to develop projects and the sector’s high capital costs.”
“If the consultation is enacted, we can expect to see a wholesale collapse in solar take up by homeowners and businesses – just at a point in time when most other countries are escalating their solar deployment having seen the dramatic impact the technology can make in tackling climate change.
The fountain of endless cheap energy is always almost, nearly, just-around-the-corner:
“The timing couldn’t be worse as the young and potentially booming solar industry is on track to go subsidy free but if these cuts happen, it will be too sudden, too soon and too dramatic. It is highly likely to irrevocably damage the domestic solar industry.
Hear all the many benefits of renewables…
Strangely, they don’t mention how the solar panels will cool the world. I thought that was the point?
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9.1 out of 10 based on 125 ratings
Pierre Gosselin has a great post: Former NOAA Meteorologist Says Employees “Were Cautioned Not To Talk About Natural Cycles”.
David Dilley, NOAA Meteorologist, tells how for 15 years work on man-made climate change was pushed while work on natural cycles was actively suppressed. Grants connecting climate change to a man-made crisis were advertised, while the word went around to heads of departments that even mentioning natural cycles would threaten the flow of government funds. Speeches about natural cycles were mysteriously canceled at the last minute with bizarre excuses.
But jobs are on the line, so only retired workers can really speak, and no one can name names.
We can corroborate David Dilley’s remarks. Indeed, he is probably just one of many skeptics hidden in the ranks of NOAA. Way back in 2007, David Evans got an email from a different insider within NOAA, around the time he started talking publicly about the missing hotspot. The insider said, remarkably: “As a Meteorologist working for [snip, name of division] it has been clear to me, as well as every single other scientist I know at NOAA, that man can not be the primary cause of global warming and that the predictions of “gloom and doom” due to rising temperatures is ridiculous”.
So there are probably many skeptics at NOAA, but given the uniformly aggressive public stance of NOAA apparently none of them can speak until after they retire.
Gross Suppression Of Science …
By P Gosselin on 26. August 2015
In the mid 1990s government grants were typically advertised in such a way to indicate that conclusions should show a connection to human activity as the cause for anthropogenic global warming. The result: most of the research published in journals became one-sided and this became the primary information tool for media outlets.
According to some university researchers who were former heads of their departments, if a university even mentioned natural cycles, they were either denied future grants, or lost grants. And it is common knowledge that United States government employees within NOAA were cautioned not to talk about natural cycles. It is well known that most university research departments live or die via the grant system. What a great way to manipulate researchers in Europe, Australia and the United States.
The uninvited phenomenon
Dilley was invited to speak about natural cycles, but just before the event mysterious “staff shortages” meant his speech was canceled. Oddly, a different speech suddenly appeared in it’s place.
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9.6 out of 10 based on 141 ratings
How low is too low? Do we want to live in a world where groups of countries gang up on non-compliant countries by randomly picking a target nation, and punishing it until it gives in? Perhaps you’d prefer a world where voters or evidence matter and where our leaders persuade each other with rational argument? Me too.
“Divide and conquer” is as old as witchdoctors
Warwick University and the Royal Society published game theory “research” which argues that it might be useful to (unethically) single out a few countries randomly that are not performing “up to climate expectations”. The researchers admit that the whole approach depends on the players being irrational.
“In the mathematical model,” said Dr Johnson, “the mechanism works best if the players are somewhat irrational. It seems a reasonable assumption that this might apply to the international community.”
No matter how they dress it up, it’s just bullying by one bunch of countries to pick on one single other one until it acquiesces. Then the next wave begins with different targets, gradually picking off one state at a time. It fails if the non-compliant states get coordinated and treat any unfair attack on one member as as attack on them all. But it could succeed if the non-compliant states don’t get networked and all keep their heads low and hope the bullies pick on someone else.
That’s why right now, before Paris, skeptics need to be getting networked internationally, and this tactic needs to be exposed for the dangerous profoundly anti-democratic game that it is.
Why should voters in one country be forced to act against their wishes because of decisions made by a bunch of bureaucrats in the EU? Let the activists speak and persuade the voters. We all know that those who can’t explain their case with reason resort to bullying instead.
Skeptics need to get the message out to their ministers who are going to Paris.
The Paris-ites will stop at nothing. They are networking and preparing right now.
Targeted punishments could provide a path to international climate change cooperation, new research in game theory has found.
Conducted at the University of Warwick, the research suggests that in situations such as climate change, where everyone would be better off if everyone cooperated but it may not be individually advantageous to do so, the use of a strategy called ‘targeted punishment’ could help shift society towards global cooperation.
Despite the name, the ‘targeted punishment’ mechanism can apply to positive or negative incentives. The research argues that the key factor is that these incentives are not necessarily applied to everyone who may seem to deserve them. Rather, rules should be devised according to which only a small number of players are considered responsible at any one time.
The study’s author Dr Samuel Johnson, from the University of Warwick’s Mathematics Institute, explains: “It is well known that some form of punishment, or positive incentives, can help maintain cooperation in situations where almost everyone is already cooperating, such as in a country with very little crime. But when there are only a few people cooperating and many more not doing so punishment can be too dilute to have any effect. In this regard, the international community is a bit like a failed state.”
The paper, published in Royal Society Open Science, shows that in situations of entrenched defection (non-cooperation), there exist strategies of ‘targeted punishment’ available to would-be punishers which can allow them to move a community towards global cooperation.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 79 ratings
More news of how the faked fixed unfree market in carbon credits feeds the people who are inclined to cheat, and may have actually increased emissions by 600 million tonnes as well (not that that matters). Around $2 billion dollars may have been wasted, but it’s worse than wasted; the money does not just evaporate. Rewarding cheating takes money from honest players of society and feeds the corrupt sector. Free markets are a powerful tool, but good tools can be used in stupid ways. And so it is with a market trying to sell units of an atmospheric-absence-of-a-gas that no one really wants or has a use for.
The only people calling for a free market in carbon are the people who don’t know what a free market is. Sometimes a free market is just a dumb idea — like when trying to run a global market in a ubiquitous gas molecule that is intrinsic to life on Earth and oceanic chemistry. Worse, we think we might do it in countries with weak law and order, and high rates of corruption. Even sillier than that, we’re trying to sell units that depend on intentions — was that a sincere new attempt at carbon reduction or were you going to make less anyway? This is such a big-government leftie idea. If someone discovers a diamond deliberately, does that make it worth less on the market? Adam Smith would be rolling in his grave. A reduction is a reduction, and all CO2 molecules are the same. But therein lies the rub. The biggest market player is Summer.
From the Stockholm Environment Institute we find that things would be more honest and productive if the money did not cross borders:
The analysis indicates that about three-quarters of JI (Joint Initiative, meaning multi-country) offsets are unlikely to represent additional emissions reductions. This suggests that the use of JI offsets may have enabled global GHG emissions to be about 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent higher than they would have been if countries had met their emissions domestically.
They did a random sample of 60 projects and found barely 14% of the Emissions Reductions Units (ERUs) issued were “credible”. Fully 73% were not credible, and 12% were questionable.
According to the BBC News Germany and Poland largely did the right thing, but Russia and Ukraine rorted the system (and what was going to stop them?). Apparently most of the projects to reduce emissions in Russia and Ukraine would have happened anyway. They were not “additional”. The carbon credit money was money for nothing. A lot of the other credits were paid to people who were probably artificially ramping up a gas called HFC-23 so they could “cut back” on this super-arch-villain of greenhouse gases and claim credits for producing less pollution. HFC-23 is the godfather of greenhouse gases: it’s 11,700 times as powerful at warming as CO2 is.
The Russians and Ukrainians were just copying the Chinese and Indians who were rorting the exact same carbon-credit game five years ago. We have learned nothing.
BBC News : Carbon credits undercut climate change actions says report
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9.6 out of 10 based on 56 ratings
 Busy slaying strawmen instead of real debate? What a facade. The ABC says its skeptics versus “the scientists” except there are no skeptics present. In typical Newspeak the ABC says “#TalkAboutIt”, but it’s a conversation with themselves. They invent “DorothyDixer” strawman questions for their own team to bravely kill.
If the ABC really wanted their listeners to discuss skeptical views, they would invite skeptics to make them — but interviews are a thing of the past (back in the days when the ABC was an institution of repute). The fake debate is the only kind that professors like Matthew England can win.
This is why the ABC fails so dismally to dint skeptical numbers in Australia. If they want to convince skeptics of their point of view then they have to deal with actual skeptical arguments, but they are too afraid to air them. Consequently they sideline themselves out of the national debate, relegated to the propaganda wars.
Correcting the ABC:
Skeptical Scientists versus The Unskeptical
The ABC offers arguments allegedly made by climate skeptics, all of them minor and of little consequence (short version first, more depth below):
Claim 1: Global warming is not happening because it is cold
Pure hypocrisy. Mirror the message: Global warming is happening because it’s hot. Haven’t we heard that before? The day that Matthew England or the ABC publicly complain about alarmist scientists who attribute single storms, floods, hot days, and reckless fish to carbon dioxide, we’ll start to take him seriously. Leading skeptics do not use this argument, but you won’t find what skeptics do say on their ABC.
Claim 2: Climate has changed throughout the Earth’s history
The banal truth. There is no state of “Climate Sameness”.
Kurt Lambeck bravely decrees that sea levels were the same for 6,000 years despite the evidence. Seas have been falling around Australia for longer, and rising and falling by one metre in the Maldives for example. A thousand tide gauge measurements show sea levels are only rising at about 1mm a year. The raw satellite data agreed, until it was “corrected” and a 3mm rise was created by adjustments.
Last time Lambeck made this flat-for-6000-year claim it was based on “modeled” estimates of sea levels back to 4000BC. (If we can model those seas so well, why do we bother with measurements and gauges at all?) But Lambeck’s sea level data has error bars ten meters wide. Seriously. (See the graphs).
Claim 3: Human emissions are tiny compared to natural CO2
Again, the banal, undeniable truth — human emissions are 4% of natural ones. Prof England does not even try to suggest that this is incorrect (nor does the ABC mention, shh, the 4% fact). What can they say?
First up, we get served the usual eye-candy-photo, the classic agitprop shot of steam-pretending-to-be-CO2. Look Mum! It’s “pollution”. Second up, check the caption: “Photo: The energy sector reportedly makes up about 76 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions“.
In the context of a debate about natural versus man-made emissions, how many ABC readers will come away misinformed? The caption implies human emissions are larger than natural ones. In the context of man-v-nature, why highlight the irrelevant sub-parts of man-made emissions at all? Corrected it would read: “the energy sector makes 76 per cent 3% of the world’s CO2 emissions”. It’s only inflated 2500%.
To raise the inanity score even further, technically, if we are talking about all greenhouse gases (that’s what they said), then water vapor rules — and emissions from the world’s oceans blast those percentage points into decimal oblivion.
Claim 4: Scientists are creating panic in order to get funding
Prof England says it’s absurd, because scientists are angels (or something like that), since they seek the truth, and are only after Nobel Prizes. I’m thinking we don’t need to pay them then, if the money is irrelevant?
But if money did have any influence, billions of dollars have been paid to find and assess a man-made crisis. There is also a 1.5 trillion dollar climate industry dependent on it, but almost no specific funding for skeptical scientists. There is no government funding to audit reports from the foreign committee called the IPCC (and, by strange coincidence, no government funded scientists have done it voluntarily).
As usual, the ABC represents the vested interests, governments and corporations, and works against the volunteers and taxpayers. Why do conservatives put up with it?
England says the person who finds a flaw will get a Nobel. Nice fantasy (should we put it to the test?). Look at Bjorn Lomborg. Forget any prize — in Australia Lomborg can’t even get an office. He believes the IPCC science and comes with $4m in funding, yet can’t work in Australia because university students have been trained to howl in “disgust” and protest until weak Vice Chancellors cave in.
Skeptics don’t get prizes from officialdom. Instead they get exiled, stranded at airports, sacked, harassed from committees, their children’s work may be targeted, they lose their professorships, and even their email accounts. (One time the ABC came to our house to interview us, but they left out the data we presented, and edited in sentences that were never said — and we can prove it, because we filmed it.) If somehow skeptics get any government funding at all, they may be subject to intrusive witchhunts from Congressional Committees, and onerous FOI’s, which universities handle in a biased one-sided manner. England lives in his fantasy land where sensible well trained scientists would work hard to prove the theory wrong then loudly announce their skepticism — but in the real world their only reward is to be called “deniers” and have their careers wrecked.
Claim 5: Antarctic sea ice is growing
Antarctic Sea Ice IS growing. See the Cryosphere satellite data. Doesn’t really fit the narrative, does it? Clara Tran and staff find a few post hoc excuses for the growth in sea ice that went entirely against the models, without admitting the models were utterly wrong (Previdi and Polvani 2014[1]). Some things can never be said.
Dr Jan Lieser from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre said sea ice growth was a symptom of global warming.
Growing sea-ice wasn’t a “symptom” of global warming until after the sea-ice grew. But that’s always how witch-doctoring works. Whatever happens, it’s now a symptom. Except science is meant to predict things.
Matthew England goes on to imply only a small sector of Antarctic sea ice is expanding, when the record ice growth applies to the ice around a lot of the continent, not just the Ross sea. Then he drags in the Arctic and Greenland as if they have something to do with Antarctic Sea Ice and finishes up with a mindless tobacco analogy. He sees skeptics as dying smokers, which says a lot about him and his ability to reason.
A climate debate on TV,
As appearing on ABC,
Is a biased affair,
With the skeptics not there,
To allow them to disagree.
–Ruairi
———————————————————————————————
How many ways can one article be wrong — there’s more
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9.5 out of 10 based on 115 ratings
TonyfromOz explained how fatal the numbers on “carbon capture” are. (It’s like the GFC of engineering). The new coal plants cost 60% more to build and waste something like 40% of the entire energy they generate to “catch” a beneficial fertilizer and and stuff it in a small hot hole underground.
It’s hard being first, but hey, the plant is only 2 years behind and $4.4 billion over budget. Part of the costs are due to delays because of wet weather. (Apparently the climate models did not see that coming…)
Obama has set aside $6 billion since 2009 for lab research and “commercial deployment” of clean coal. In response to the abject failure he’s doing what most people do when spending other people’s money — “Despite these troubles, the White House says it will continue to support clean coal.”
News last week:
[Link may not work, try “cached copy“.]
Stephen Lacey
Last week, state regulators approved an emergency rate increase for Mississippi Power in order to keep the company afloat as it completes the increasingly-expensive Kemper plant. Mississippi Power customers will see a temporary rate increase of 18 percent — a change that could become permanent, depending on the utility’s financial health.
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9.6 out of 10 based on 68 ratings
George Soros has poured money into promoting “climate change” politics through his foundations, working to demonize coal, but the man himself is now buying coal stocks. Analysts are asking if he is buying in to shut them down, or to pick up a bargain and take the profits. (There must also be options where he gets control to turn them into mixed energy renewables/coal plays.) But in the end he’s 85, and worth $24 billion. He has an 11 billion dollar stock portfolio and he’s spent less than $3 million on coal. It’s hard to believe the profits would be worth the bad press. Though Steve Milloy points out those companies own rights to 11 billion tons of coal reserves.
Coal used to supply 50% of US electricity, now it’s 40%. Peabody Energy Shares used to trade at $90, but now trade at $1.
Fox News
Soros, whose Climate Policy Initiative think tank recently urged the world to stop using fossil fuels in general and coal in particular, snapped up 1 million shares of Peabody Energy and half a million shares of Arch Coal, giving him significant stakes in what’s left of the U.S. coal industry.
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9 out of 10 based on 65 ratings
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8.4 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
NOAA has a press release out being picked up around the world. For example, the DailyMail, UK, is saying July was the hottest month since records began in 1880 as heatwaves swept the Earth’s countries and oceans. Other silly tabloids have headlines about this being the hottest July in 4,000 years, as if we have even the remotest idea what the average July global temperature was in the days of Plato.
Better data shows July this year is the hottest since way back in… 2014. It’s not 4,000 years, not 135 years, it’s the hottest July since the last one.
July 2015 is not even the hottest month since June.
But some journalists will believe anything. Anthony Sharman, sports journalist, News.com, Australia, thinks we know the global temperature of the July that Jesus was born. Who’s a gullible journalist then? (And who was that gullible editor?) We have estimates of the temperature of whole years circa one AD, but we don’t have “monthly” data. Not too many thermometers. How good are those tree-rings? Check out this fantasy headline:
Yes July could have been the hottest month in 4,000 years, and it could have been the first month Earth was visited by aliens — there is no evidence for that either.
Anthony Sharman read one press release and thinks he knows more than what he got from the cereal box:
CLIMATE change is real. Climate change is happening. The world is getting warmer. There was no global pause. This thing is not slowing down.
These are the inescapable conclusions for anyone who sources their information beyond cereal boxes, internet forums and oil industry spokespeople…
It’s no-holds-barred, pure agitprop. (I’ll bet he feels smug today, eh? 😉 ). Do leave a comment to help them get past their fawning commitment to publish chumpy unresearched propaganda.
9.3 out of 10 based on 153 ratings
Welcome to carbon accounting games. Which other global “free” market is based on a ubiquitous molecule made by life on Earth, and produced in massive quantities in places where it’s almost impossible to even measure accurately? The largest non-human and human players don’t play (they don’t pay). Massive quantities go missing from the accounts, while other countries are expected to turn their economies upside down to cut one tenth as much.
Shu Liu et al estimate China’s output of CO2 was 14% lower in 2013 than other estimates.[1] They estimate China emitted 2.5 Gt of “carbon” in 2013. Australia produces around 0.1 Gt a year.* So China’s “reduction” was 2 – 3 times what Australia produces every year. There is no other market in the world where so much hard money changes hands based on soft guesses about a product that no one wants, and is hard to even measure.
Frank Jotzo, ANU, reveals how irrelevant actual CO2 emissions are — it’s “good news” that doesn’t make any difference:
Frank Jotzo, the director of the Center for Climate Economics and Policy at the Australian National University in Canberra, said it was “good news” that Chinese coal was yielding less carbon dioxide, “but it does not change the fundamentals, nor the challenge that China faces in getting away from coal.”
China uses nearly half the world’s coal. People from the outside are trying to guess how much CO2 China emits.
Some things were never going to be suitable for a “free market”. CO2 is one of them.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 54 ratings
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