Cheaters have been around since the Age of Amoeba

UPDATE: This is generating some good discussion, which is what I wanted to help me explain why this is relevant. It’s a study about amoeba, but reveals something I think about biological “laws” of all cooperative societies and genetics. It’s very relevant to the nature-nurture debate, and to national politics and policies.
UPDATE #2: The cheating referred to in this post is defined as “social cheating” meaning to take some advantage over and above contributions to the social group. The amoeba are a simple “model system” that may help us learn more about the factors that influence the balance of “cheaters” versus “cooperators” in any social species.

See the critics and my replies at #7 and #16. Give it your best shot. :- ) Jo

You might think that corruption in science has only been around for 20 or 30 years. But I say this problem has been around since the Age of Amoeba.

The day after cells evolved to cooperate, some of them learnt to cheat. The battle of the cooperators versus the cheaters hasn’t stopped since and humans are the most socially evolved cooperators on the planet, (which just means we have more socially evolved cheats, too). This is not a problem that is ever going to go away. But before you get depressed remember the cooperators outnumbers the cheaters. It’s not all bad.

In many niches cooperative groups outcompete the separate individuals and end up dominating, but then cheating becomes a really sweet deal, and the number of crooks rise until the whole system falls apart — or the cooperators wise up and figure out a way to police the cheats. In the end, Cheaters do have an advantage, but only if most players don’t cheat.

The new study below is on amoebic cheats and there have been many incarnations before it. The new edge here, possibly, is that the cheaters-v-cooperators battle in amoeba has reached a permanent genetic stalemate of sorts. Neither group can get the complete upper hand and instead there are a suite of some 140 social genes that affect the balance of cheaters and cooperators (140 genes, and that’s just in an amoeba). Furthermore, the social genes in Texan amoeba were surprisingly similar to the social genes in Virginian amoeba. Some kind of evolutionary selection was keeping the same variants in different populations.

What does it mean? That corruption and cheating is not something we solve permanently but something we minimize. That we need to teach children about eternal vigilance, and about the boom and bust cycle of rising corruption and crash.

So many are surely naive,
To accept what they’re told to believe,
To place such reliance,
On some ‘experts’ in science,
Whom they trust not to cheat and deceive.

—- Ruairi

Press Release

Do cheaters have an evolutionary advantage?

Anyone who has crawled along in the left lane while other drivers raced up the right lane, which was clearly marked “lane ends, merge left,” has experienced social cheating, a maddening and fascinating behavior common to many species.

Although it won’t help with road rage, scientists are beginning to understand cheating in simpler “model systems,” such as the social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum.

At one stage in their life cycle thousands of the normally solitary Dicty converge to form a multicellular slug and then a fruiting body, consisting of a stalk holding aloft a ball of spores. It is during this cooperative act that the opportunity for cheating arises.

Some amoebae ultimately become cells in the stalk of the fruiting body and die, while others rise to the top, and form spores that pass their genes to the next generation. When unrelated amoebae gather to form a fruiting body, some strains may overcontribute to the spores and undercontribute to the stalk. These are the cheaters.

Scientists knew that cheaters could be found in wild populations of Dicty, but whether this was a successful strategy in the game of natural selection was anyone’s guess.

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Exotic adventures in global data to unfind “the Pause”, by Karl in 2015

UPDATED: Ross McKitrick’s PDF file has some minor changes.

The Pause has been unfound, not with new data, but with new adjustments in one odd dataset.

The awkward “Pause” in global temperatures shows up in every major dataset. It’s the reality that conflicts with nearly every major climate model. But it’s there in the Hadley records of land surface and ocean, it shows up in the Hadley sea surface measurements, it’s there in NCDC, GISS, and of course in the satellite data of RSS, and UAH, and it shows up in the best data we have on the ocean, the ARGO buoys. It’s quite the challenge to unfind it!

major global temperature data sets, global warming pause, 2015

(Thanks to Ross McKitrick for the individual graphs)

To find global warming in the last 15 years, we need to ignore all that and use sea surface data blended from boats randomly trekking through shipping lanes with buckets and from ocean buoys (and that’s not ARGO buoys). But even that isn’t enough, that original data needs to be adjusted, and where sea ice gets in the way, gap-filled from sparse land data (as you would right?). Then we need to accept a lower-than-usual significance test, and carefully cherry pick the time periods to blend the past rapid warming with past cooling, so we can say we’ve found the holy grail, a quasi significant slight “warming trend” in data adjusted with a wildly uncertain correction estimate. And Professor Matthew England likes this kind of science.

Ross McKitrick points out that to get the new NOAA sea surface data they added 0.12 °C to the buoy readings, to make them more like the ship data. That magic number came from Kennedy et al. (2011) where the uncertainty was reported as (wait for it) 0.12 ± 1.7°C. (Which is like saying there is definitely one apple here, give or take 17 apples. So this is what 95% certainty looks like?). Worse, that uber-extremely-uncertain-number was supposed to be used to adjust the ship data down so it was closer to the buoys. The authors felt the buoys were more accurate than bucket-from-ships. Even Karl et al paradoxically agree (have cake, eat cake), saying that because the buoy data is better, it should be weighted higher. In this fashion, the best data can get adjusted the most, to make it more like the bad data, then it can count for more. This is Double-Good-Science! Thanks to Ross McKitricks comments on Karl et al 2015 for details (1K PDF).

Here’s how this dubious chain of uncertainty and assumptions plays out in the media:

Professor Matthew England, Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at UNSW, said the findings were no surprise.

“There’s nothing all that new in this paper and nothing that surprises me,” Professor England said.

“The bottom line is that multiple data sets and multiple lines of evidence have shown that global warming hasn’t stalled at all’”

Who is the denier then? The person who recognises the obvious results in all the major data sets, or the person who is “not surprised” when a contrived adjusted concoction of not-good data produces a result he expected? (Well really, who at this late stage is really surprised by the recent try-on?)

This is so desperate even other fans of the global warming theory are not buying it. They have some standards. They know the global temperature pause is real:

Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Britain’s Met Office Hadley Centre said…

“The slowdown hasn’t gone away, however,” and “The results of this study still show the warming trend over the past 15 years has been slower than previous 15 year periods.”

Prof Tim Osborn, Professor of Climate Science at the University of East Anglia, said he would caution against dismissing the slowdown in surface warming on the basis of this study, nor to downplay the role of natural decadal variability for short-term trends in climate.

“There are other datasets that still support a slowdown over some recent period of time, and there are intriguing geographical patterns such as cooling in large parts of the Pacific Ocean that were used to support explanations for the warming slowdown,” Professor Osborn said… (h.t to Waxing Gibberish).

[Reuters] “Some other experts said however the idea of a hiatus was still valid, since warming had probably slowed this century if compared to fast rates in the 1980s and 1990s.

“It is curious that a comparison with these decades was not included in this new study,” said Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading. (h/t Barry Woods)

In the endless quest to make reality fit the models, the adjustments to data have become their own parody. What is “evidence” anymore? Evidence schmevidence.

Seven steps to unfind the Pause?

Anthony Watts, Bob Tisdale, Judith Curry, Pat Michaels, Richard Lindzen, Paul C. Knappenberger, and the GWPF and Fred Singer have already taken it apart.

@NOAA ‘s desperate new paper: Is there no global warming ‘hiatus’ after all? – WUWT

Reports Of The Death Of The Global Warming Pause Are Greatly Exaggerated – GWPF

Use a weak test: p < 0.1, not the usual significance. Bit desperate.
Use assumptions and apply large adjustments to sea surface data. Don’t use the best dataset for sea-surface temps (ARGO). Ignore the satellites.
Create Arctic sea surface temperatures by extending data from land measurements. The ocean there is covered in ice. There aren’t many land measurements to go from. What could possibly go wrong?
Don’t mention the eighties or nineties. The fastest recent global warming occurred in the 1980’s and1990’s. Obviously the 2000’s are red-light bad news for the alarm-us camp, because that was when CO2 emissions increased dramatically but the warming slowed. The worst possible thing is to compare those decadal trends to the previous ones.
Cherry pick the time frames! Karl et al carefully choose a long trend — all the way back to the 1950s — in order to find a weak long term warming trend that the recent decade can outdo. Back in the 50s and 60s, the world was cooling, so wrapping in and averaging the long cooling and then warming cycle, they can come up with a small warming trend number.
To find warming in the sea surface during the pause, it helps to adjust the late 90’s sea surface temps down and the recent measurements up, thus increasing the trend in the last 15 years, but not affecting the trend across the whole period. Check.
Ignore contradictions like: why can’t we find a hot spot? If the surface warmed more than we thought, the upper troposphere should have warmed even faster. This means the missing hot spot is more missing than before.

Anthony Watts and Bob Tisdale have some eye watering graphs on temperature adjustments. Get a load of this:

sea surface temperatures, adjustments, NOAA data, Karl et al.

Adjustments to sea surface data cool the late 1990s, and warm the last ten years. | Thanks to Anthony Watts and Bob Tisdale.

This is a fairly standard form of adjustment — cool the past, warm the present. Smooth the bumps.

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9.1 out of 10 based on 109 ratings

Which countries will survive climate change?

Great news for Australians, Scandinavias, Greenlanders, Poms, and New Zealanders: all the headlines about how your home will be the hardest hit were wrong. Instead, your real estate will be the most valuable on Earth and everyone will want to visit you.

Thank The Guardian for its restrained headline: Countries most and least likely to survive the effects of climate change . Study source: Diply

…

I expect you will all be relieved. Especially after the fear you felt reading “hardest hit” headlines like these:

“Rural Australians hardest hit by climate change”

“Sydney’s urban areas to be hit hardest by global warming”

“Predictions Australia will be hardest hit by climate change”

Greenland hardest hit by climate change

“…climate change is likely to have the strongest impact on Scandinavian countries such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden.”

“Climate change is faster and more severe in the Arctic than in most of the rest of the world”

— Thanks to ClimateChangePredictions and Tom Nelson’s hardest hit list.

The original map on Diply also has a “least at risk” category, helpfully colored black and applied to no country. That figures, nowhere is “least at risk” for climate change. Perhaps that category is for the moon? (But not Jupiter, Mars or Pluto, don’t move there.)

But after the relief comes the guilt

You, lucky sods in rich nations, caused the problem and now you must pay. But of course, that penance money doesn’t go to poor farmers or businesses in Africa directly, it goes straight to the UN where convoys of bureaucrats make a good living. (Dare I suggest that the best way to help Africa is not with big governance payments that end up going through corrupt dictators, but with a thousand deals going straight to small businesses? Bring on free trade.)

What Africa desperately needs is cheap energy to run fridges, cook dinner, clean water, and transport fresh food. Not more bureaucrats, money-hungry-windmills, and not sea-walls to hold back a 1mm a year sea level rise.

The top 10 most likely to cope

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Study shows ARGO ocean robots uncertainty was up to 100 times larger than advertised

The oceans contain 90% of the heat energy on the surface of the Earth, which makes it “kinda important”. There are claims that the missing heat went into ocean temperatures, which are allegedly warming by five thousandths of a degree per year (which is still a lot less than the models predicted). The ARGO array of 3,000 ocean buoys deployed from mid-2003 is a vast improvement on the occasional sampling from ships that preceded it, but each single thermometer measures a vast 200,000 cubic kilometers of ocean.

The original Argo Science Report had an expected temperature sensor uncertainty of 0.005C. But it’s just not possible to measure the ocean temperature that accurately. Each thermometer may be accurate in a laboratory to 0.005C, but thermal noise in the ocean is an impossible beast. The four-kilometer-deep swirling mass of eddies varies from 0C – 30C. It is not a well mixed swimming pool at one temperature, being measured 3,000 times simultaneously — the statistics are entirely dissimilar.

I went looking for papers on error estimates and found Hadfield 2007.

The Hadfield study compared the new ARGO robotic buoys to other ways of measuring ocean temperatures in a slice across the North Atlantic. The results are fairly devastating for claims that the oceans are heating by 0.005° C per year. Hadfield et al found that the Argo network made errors around 0.5° C, and up to 2° C in one area.

Essentially a boat cruised across the Atlantic in mid 2005, stopping to take precise measurements along the way by lowering an accurate sensor (a “CTD”). The Hadfield study compared the ARGO results of water temperature to that hydrographic study. One of the problems with this study was the newness of the ARGO array at the time, which had 2,000 buoys in 2005, and didn’t reach the full complement of 3,000 until 2007. So the sampled error will be smaller now than it was then. But there are orders of magnitude of errors, that can’t be solved with 50% more data points.

Figure 6. Position of the cruise track (thick line) and the temperature profiles used to estimate the temperature field along the hydrographic section; circles indicate positions of profiles sampled within 30 days of the cruise CTD, pluses indicate positions of profiles sampled more than 30 days before or after the cruise CTD. The temporal spread of Argo data used in the OI spans 62 days before the cruise CTD to
72 days after the cruise CTD.

Figure 7. (a) Signal, (b) noise, and (c) the signal to noise ration (SNR) across 36N (Cape Hatteras–Mediterranean). Figures 7a and 7b are in degrees Celsius and Figure 7c is unitless. Contours of 1 are shown in Figure 7c.

As far as heat content goes, I notice that models predict about 0.7W/m² for the radiative effect of CO2 on the oceans. But in Hadfield, the sampling error was quote, “10–20 W/m²“. And it was even worse in the “Gulf Stream” and “north of 40N” (which is a large part of the world) where it was 50W/m².

A minuscule change in degrees,
In all the world’s oceans and seas,
Should not cause dismay,
As on any one day,
Sea-water could boil or could freeze.

— Ruairi

Abstract

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Save the world with legislation? Three quarters of worlds emissions “limited” by red-tape and meaningless targets

Here’s a new form of climate control. Red-tape. Count the laws for the climate!

[ScienceDaily] London School of Economics (LSE)

Three-quarters of the world’s annual emissions of greenhouse gases are now limited by national targets, according to a new study published today (1 June 2015) by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.

Obviously, it’s all taken care of then, and we don’t need to do any more? We’ll just hound and hassle the last few stragglers who haven’t set a limit. But wait… despite the heart warming momentum implied there, apparently this global circle of covenants might not save the world. Oh No! Is there a chance these nations won’t deliver? The sad truth makes a brief appearance in paragraph four: The pledges are unlikely to be “consistent” (read, they’re “inadequate, empty wishes”). Red tape, it seems, will not stop heatwaves exactly, but provides atmospheric things called “confidence” and “credibility”, “opportunity” and “ambition”. But the 75% “limit” makes for a good headline.

The Grantham Research Institute speaks. Your job is to figure out what they are saying:

Lead author of the study, Michal Nachmany, said: “With three-quarters of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions now covered by national targets, we can be more confident about the credibility of the pledges that countries will make ahead of the crucial United Nations summit in Paris in December this year. While collectively these pledges are unlikely to be consistent with the international goal of avoiding global warming of more than 2 centigrade degrees, the existence of national legislation and policies should provide the opportunity for countries to strengthen the ambition of their emissions cuts after the summit.”

It’s laws for the climate then

The study also found that the 98 countries and the European Union together had 804 climate laws and policies at the end of 2014, compared with 426 in 2009, when a previous attempt was made in Copenhagen, Denmark, to reach an international agreement. In 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, these countries had just 54 climate laws and policies between them.

Study that success. This is what a 15 fold increase in climate laws has achieved:

Not quite the emissions reductions they legislated?

How many laws do we need to reduce global temperatures by one degree?

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8.9 out of 10 based on 89 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

Ideas that wander…

7.6 out of 10 based on 32 ratings

Cholesterol — how the web and books are years ahead of “Consensus”

Consensus — slowing real science for decades

There is a surprising amount of interest in the cholesterol story of Matt Ridley’s in The Times and The Australian last week. Surprising to me anyway, because 15 years ago the other benevolent side of cholesterol was pretty clear online. Fifteen years is not a long time in human civilization, but it’s a long time in a human life. And in the case of the war on cholesterol, it’s been running for 40 years. How many people died sooner than they would have, because they followed expert advice?

Finally the official consensus on cholesterol is admitting defeat:

“Any day now, the US government will officially accept the advice to drop cholesterol from its list of “nutrients of concern” altogether. It wants also to “de-emphasise” saturated fat, given “the lack of evidence connecting it with cardiovascular disease”. “

In the late 1990’s it was widely known online (among health zealots) that our livers are mostly in charge of our cholesterol levels, not what’s on our dinner plates. Something like 80% of the cholesterol in our blood came from our own livers, not the food we eat. Way back then, it was also known that our bodies use cholesterol to make things like Vitamin D, and er… sex hormones. (How did the mass media miss that.)

“Cholesterol is not some vile poison but an essential ingredient of life, which makes animal cell membranes flexible and is the raw material for making hormones, like testosterone and oestrogen.”

You might think the Internet would kill off an erroneous consensus faster…

But on the Net silly, sloppy and false information can be repeated faster too. As long as people using the web are trained to follow authority, they aren’t even looking for the counter claims. The Net could speed things up if people learned to hunt for the best arguments on both sides, but who are we kidding — even science journalists are not trained to do that.

People are probably still under the illusion that newspapers as a source of risky, cutting news, but the mainstream press is so timid against the mainstream dogma that science-journalists are a part of the science problem.

The consensus on cholesterol has run for a long time on nothing more than argument from authority, and a few not-well-done analyses:

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The bureaucratic science-machine broke science, and people are starting to ask how to fix it

Science is broken. The genius, the creative art of scientific discovery, has been squeezed into a square box, sieved through grant applications, citation indexes, and journal rankings, then whatever was left gets crushed through the press. We tried to capture the spirit of discovery in a bureaucratic formula, but have strangled it instead.

There are no shortcuts to the truth, or to status, and no easy way to figure out which projects should be funded. Every time a decision is crowd sourced — via committee, panel, or “consensus” — the responsibility for thinking gets divided and avoided.

The modern bureaucratic process of science is now not even trying to search for the truth. It’s hunting instead for an impact factor, for attention, for headlines, and inevitably, for funding.

It is good to see people starting to discuss it — including the Lancet Editor, Richard Horton, who wrote in April that he could not name names, but it needed to be said:

“A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked
to observe Chatham House rules. Those who worked for government agencies pleaded that their comments especially remain unquoted…

…[it is] one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts
of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has
taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”.

Richard Horton is talking mostly about biomedicine, but the problem is endemic:

Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivised to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivised to be productive and innovative.

More red tape won’t set science free

I don’t think his suggestions are the answer, and even Horton seems to agree with that. A Hippocratic Oath for science, will help, but not much. Similarly, writing regulations to insist on a certain percentage of replicability in grant applications is only tinkering at the edges. As is emphasizing collaboration rather than competition, or insisting on “preregistration of protocols”. Likewise, rewarding “better pre and post publication peer review”, or improving research “training and mentorship”. None of that will make discovering the truth the main game again.

Lets start the list of what we need

What we need (for starters) is better training in logic and reason, and it needs to start in primary school. All kids need to know what an ad hominem argument is, and to spot the weak argument from authority. I shouldn’t need to explain what those are to a science graduate, a science communicator, a science journalist, or a science minister. A professor who can’t reason, shouldn’t be a professor. Actually I shouldn’t need to explain these fallacies even to a 12 year old, because it should be rote learned by 10.

Then we need to fix the incentives. We need to find a way to reward creative genius which breaks assumptions, rather than the sort that just fits in the box. We need to let genius flourish again, instead of bureaucracy.

To fix science we also need to fix science journalism, and science communication. Because these ought be another layer of protection. Good journalists and interviewers shouldn’t let scientists get away with dumb answers. Good science communicators serve the public, not the bureaucratic science-machine. Instead our supposedly best science magazines just report smear by association: see New Scientist: The Age of Name-Calling.

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8.7 out of 10 based on 90 ratings

North Atlantic cooling means climate change of a different kind coming?

Is this the way the backdown plays out? The endless warming becomes cooling, and man-made change becomes natural cycles one paper at a time? The press releases still talk of “change”! No mention that natural cycles could have been the cause of past warming, and that skeptics have been saying this for years.

Atlantic ocean, temperatures, sea level circulation index

Figure 3 | Sea-level circulation index, the NAO and the AMO on multidecadal
timescales. Shown are the accumulated sea-level index (blue), which is
representative of subpolar heat content evolution, the accumulated NAO (red,
dashed) and the AMO (black). The heat content proxy and the accumulated
NAO have been normalized. All timeseries have been 7-year low-pass filtered.
The accumulated sea-level index and accumulated NAO have been detrended.

This Nature paper will be tricky to feed into the “Panic Now!” scenario. It’s still climate change, but it’s a half a degree of cooling that might be headed your way if you live around the northern Atlantic.

UPDATE: A quick summary of the paper. McCarthy et al created a circulation index (blue line, fig 3) which appears to lead the AMO (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, black line) by two years. The sea level index is generated by comparing sea levels north and south of Cape Hatteras, USA. The authors spend quite a bit of time explaining why that area is the most useful proxy for changes in ocean circulation. Their circulation index suggests the AMO has shifted to a “negative” colder phase which may last decades.

The press release is below for this tricky paper that doesn’t follow the IPCC plan. In the world of climate news it’s important that the headlines include the words “climate”, “global” and “change” and not the words “cooling”, “natural cycles” or “skeptics might be right”.

Global climate on verge of multi-decadal change

[Science Daily] A new study, by scientists from the University of Southampton and National Oceanography Centre (NOC), implies that the global climate is on the verge of broad-scale change that could last for a number of decades.

The change to the new set of climatic conditions is associated with a cooling of the Atlantic, and is likely to bring drier summers in Britain and Ireland, accelerated sea-level rise along the northeast coast of the United States, and drought in the developing countries of the Sahel region.

But global warming is still coming. One day. Sometime.

Since this new climatic phase could be half a degree cooler, it may well offer a brief reprise from the rise of global temperatures, as well as resulting in fewer hurricanes hitting the United States.

The study, published in Nature, proves that ocean circulation is the link between weather and decadal scale climatic change. It is based on observational evidence of the link between ocean circulation and the decadal variability of sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean.

So ocean circulation is the link between weather and “decadal scale climate”. Doesn’t that mean the models that didn’t include this link didn’t predict this cooling, were wrong, and overestimated the CO2? No one seems to mention that.

Lead author Dr Gerard McCarthy, from the NOC, said: “Sea-surface temperatures in the Atlantic vary between warm and cold over time-scales of many decades. These variations have been shown to influence temperature, rainfall, drought and even the frequency of hurricanes in many regions of the world. This decadal variability, called the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO), is a notable feature of the Atlantic Ocean and the climate of the regions it influences.”

Doesn’t that mean that natural variation is still more important than man-made emissions, and isn’t that what skeptics have been saying for decades?

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8.9 out of 10 based on 107 ratings

US Republicans vote to spend more on hard science, less on social-climatey type stuff

US Republicans have passed a bill through the House (but not the Senate yet) aiming to get back some control over the 7 billion dollar science budget. Previously the National Science Foundation (or NSF) had all the fun in dishing out the dough, but the Republicans have had enough. Their wish list includes cutting social sciences by 55%, climate science by 8%, and putting extra money into biology, computers, engineering and hard sciences. It can’t come soon enough.

Critics are howling that this will politicize science, but it’s just the opposite. Science was already politicized, and thanks in no small part to the NSF itself. This would put control of the funding back slightly closer to the voters. The NSF is almost unaccountable to the taxpayer, and if the NSF had not wasted money on so many one-sided pointless extravaganza’s (like $5m for “climate games”) and tipped so much money into “behavioural” studies, the elected members would not be knocking at their door. The NSF has only itself to blame.

Ultimately, elected representatives have to be accountable for public spending, but they like to hand over control to a committee of experts. Said committee grows on the gravy train, and after decades of big-government-dependence, why would anyone be surprised if it transforms into a fan of big-government, boosting projects that promote the big-government agenda? The incentives are all wrong. Our ARC suffers from the same big-governmentitis. (Send a memo to Australian politicians.) ARC grants often seem to be a form of government advertising disguised as research.

h/t GWPF

Republicans Vote to Restrict Climate Funding

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9.4 out of 10 based on 85 ratings

Most Australians are skeptical: mankind is not main driver of the climate

The IPCC has told us in letters of fire for twenty years that humans are the dominant cause of climate change. But despite the unending propaganda 60% of Australians are not convinced. This fits with other better designed and much larger surveys by CSIRO showing that 53% of the population are skeptical, and a UK study which showed that 63% of British people were skeptical that storms and floods are probably man-made.

The IPSOS polls have been running for years, and are unashamedly pro-IPCC in leaning, but despite that obvious bias, and loaded, ambiguous questions, most Australians don’t agree that it is mainly our fault. The climate is changing but it is mainly or partly natural. IPSOS gloss over that, but if humans are responsible for less than half of “climate change” that makes Direct Action twice as useless. If natural forces caused more of the recent warming, that also reduces the scary projections.

The IPSOS Climate Change Report 2015 (Online poll, 1,063 people)

Q3: Which best describes your opinion about the causes of climate change?

Poll Australians, Climate change, 2015, belief,

Only 40% of Australians accept the IPCC position that mankind is the main cause of climate change (orange and red). | Click to enlarge. See p 5 of the report.

Like nearly all polls, this one suffers from using the loaded and confounded term “climate change”. To the person filling out the form it could mean either “man-made global warming” or “the climate… changes“. What were those survey designers and journalists thinking? Not about accurate English, that’s for sure.

Three percent say “there is no such thing as climate change”. But given the abuse of the term and double meaning, it could be just a protest at being asked a silly question. Are there ice-ages? Has the worlds climate been stable for 4.5 billion years?

Meaningless and loaded questions

Question 8: Who should be mainly responsible for action on climate change?

Is that the government, businesses, or Mr Sun? Seriously, for the 60% of respondents who don’t think humans are the main driving cause of climate change, how do they answer these questions? I think the state government should hold back the tides, the NGO’s can deal with cosmic rays, and the local council can fix the magnetic field, right?

Question 7: “In how many years, if at all, do you think climate change will cause the following in Australia”. The list of coming disasters was fire and brimstone 101. IPSOS were not just wondering when the reef will get damaged, but looking for the “Destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.” Then there was the extinction of plants and animals with a little symbol of a Koala head socked in the eyes.

Most of the population said that climate change is mainly or partly natural. But if we substitute the word natural in front of climate change it all gets inane. How many years will it take for natural climate change to destroy the Barrier Reef? ANS: It hasn’t done it yet in the last 20,000 years, why should 2050 be any different?

Let’s guess what the survey designers were thinking when they wrote this? 1/ Al Gore is right and these disasters are coming. or 2/ We need the best guess long range forecasts from the punters about what the natural climate is going to do this century: droughts, floods, fire and extinctions. What do they reckon?

Push polling anyone?

Question 7 is just a measure of the success of propaganda. (See the results below). When will the “decline in farming production” occur? 51% think that’s already happening. But what is happening (scientifically at least) is “an increase in farming production“, and a “greening of the deserts“, which are recorded in hundreds of publications, but not an option for respondents. The future on offer are all modeled projections, or events that have been occurring since time began.

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9.5 out of 10 based on 86 ratings

Maurice Newman knows more about climate models than the BOM’s Dr Rob Vertessy

In the topsy turvy world of modern science, big-government has strangled science to the point where bright outsiders know more than the fully trained “experts”.

Maurice Newman, the chairman of the P.M’s business advisory council, daringly wrote in The Australian:

“It’s a well-kept secret, but 95 per cent of the climate models we are told prove the link between human CO2 emissions and catastrophic global warming have been found, after nearly two decades of temperature stasis, to be in error.”

In Senate estimates, a Greens spokesperson asked Dr Rob Vertessy, Director of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) on his view of this. “That is incorrect,” he said, showing how little he knows about climate models, where everyone (even the IPCC) is trying to figure out excuses for their failures. Some even invent time-travelling climate models that can finally “predict” today’s climate correctly a decade after it happened.

If Maurice Newman was wrong, he was far too generous to the climate modelers. Instead of a 95% failure rate, it’s well up over 98%. Hans von Storch et al published a paper nearly two years ago comparing models and observations of a 15 year long pause. Statistically von Storch could find no justification for people saying the models matched the observations — there was a less than 2% chance of that. Last year Ross McKitrick estimated the pause was really 19 years long, so the odds are now less than 0.5%. Newman was being kind, suggesting that 5% of models might be called “right”.

Some will try to weasel out of it, saying the pause isn’t a pause because the missing heat went into the oceans. Aside from the fact that we can’t possibly measure the ocean heat accurately enough to know, there is the problem that the models are supposed to model the ocean too. They are called “global coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation models”. Those models predicted the heat would be in the atmosphere, not the ocean, and it isn’t. Does that kind of failure matter? Only if you live on land.

The models not only fail on global decadal scales, but on regional, local, short term, [1] [2], polar[3], and upper tropospheric scales[4] [5] too. They fail on humidity[6], rainfall[7], drought [8] and they fail on clouds [9]. The hot spot is missing, the major feedbacks are not amplifying the effect of CO2 as assumed.

The IPCC’s favourite models were 100% wrong in 1990. The IPCC prediction in 1990, the oldest prediction they cannot weasel out of, was a best estimate of 0.3°C per decade with a range of 0.2°C – 0.5°C. Even with the most generous overestimate of current trends, the temperature trend has fallen below their lowest estimate, at the same time as CO2 emissions were higher than expected. Prof Matthew England, and the ABC still owe Nick Minchin an apology. Rob Vertessy owes one to Maurice Newman as well now.

Dr Rob Vertessy‘s expertise is in “fluvial geomorphology and physical hydrology“. Water catchment. That doesn’t mean he can’t understand climate models, just that he needs to start reading as widely on the climate as investment bankers do.

The warmists just love a good model,
Not those on the catwalk who waddle,
But the ones that forecast,
That the warming would last,
Being wrong,were 99% twaddle.

— Ruairi

REFERENCES

Hans von Storch, Armineh Barkhordarian, Klaus Hasselmann and Eduardo Zorita (2013) Can climate models explain the recent stagnation in global warming? Academia

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9.2 out of 10 based on 116 ratings

Unthreaded Weekend

Kalbarri, Western Australia, about 600km North of Perth….(Click to enlarge)

The colors are glorious in the land of iron oxide.

Though I pitied any poor shipwrecked soul staggering ashore here at the wrong time of year. How forbidding, dry and vast that landscape.

8.5 out of 10 based on 36 ratings

No one has engaged the deniers! Says Graham Richardson. Oh really? says Jo Nova.

” Labor vacated the arena of argument. The sceptics and deniers have turned the 70 per cent-plus belief in climate change into a minority because no one has engaged them.“

— Graham Richardson, Friday May 22nd, 2015

No one has engaged them?

That’s right Graham, we unfunded bloggers and the few surviving skeptical scientists not evicted and blackballed from our universities (yet) have tricked 20% of the population because no one has put forward the climate change arguments except for: The Climate Commission, CSIRO, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Royal Dutch Shell, GE, Panasonic, The ABC, The BBC, The Guardian, Fairfax, The Australian government, most universities, The EU, The UN, The World Bank, and the IMF.

With a budget of nothing we’re winning. Why? We have nature on our side.* The world isn’t warming, the models can’t predict the real climate, and half the population have wised up to the propaganda. The main arguments of those who would control CO2 are not scientific, but insults and bluster, shutting up and disqualifying critics rather than answering politely, and producing the evidence. The University of Queensland offers a whole course in namecalling to train people to “engage” deniers. But the public know that the endless drought ended, the dams filled, the predictions were wrong and that “denier” is not science. Namecalling isn’t working anymore (so keep it coming Graham, it helps the skeptics 🙂 ).

No one will debate skeptics

Obviously it’s a David versus Goliath battle. If Richardson means that no one will debate the skeptical arguments, he’s right.

Dear Graham, why don’t you invite one of Prof Sherwood, Prof Pitman or Will Steffen to debate Dr David Evans on your Skyshow? That’s when you’ll find out how they run scared of real debate. You are welcome to argue your case here too.

Others have tried to arrange these debates. On behalf of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Western Australia, Bill Crabtree invited Prof Pitman and anyone he cared to nominate to debate David Evans and Bill Kinnimonth a couple of years ago. Pitman refused, saying he wouldn’t debate “someone who denies gravity”. David Evans: PhD, M.S. (E.E.), M.S. (Stats) [Stanford Uni], B.Eng, M.A., B.Sc., University Medal, [Syd Uni]. Bill Kininmonth: Headed the National Climate Centre at the Bureau of Meteorology from 1986 to 1998. Andy Pitmans: BSc (Hons) PhD (1988) Liverpool Uni. UK Postgraduate Certificate in Educational Leadership (2000) Macquarie Uni.

Andy Pitman isn’t stupid; he knows what would happen if he debated Dr David Evans. He knows that their 95% certainty rests on broken models, and iteratively homogenized, reanalyzed, and readjusted data.

Andy Pitman and I debated each other in emails back in 2008 before I even published the Skeptics Handbook. I wanted to make all those emails public. Andy Pitman refused.

I debated Prof Glikson in 2010, through five rounds of to and fro, but he clearly had no idea the models depend on assumptions about water vapor that we know are wrong. The offer remains open for him to send in his reply, which he asked to be published on my site. I welcomed it (like all the other replies), but he didn’t send anything.

Graham Richardson, The Australian “Silence of the political lambs”

Here’s the relevant paragraph in context:

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9.5 out of 10 based on 208 ratings

New satellite analysis fails to find the hot spot, agrees with millions of weather balloons

Here I go, harping on about the missing hot spot again.

Roy Spencer has been hunting for the famous missing hot spot (like half the climate world) but he’s been looking in the UAH satellite temperature data. Last week Sherwood et al claimed they finally found it (again!) in an iteratively reiterated homogenized and adjusted version of radiosondes. Spencer was not impressed with the black box statistics approach. As I pointed out here, the Sherwood results was adjusted so much it did not look like the original data, and they somehow found the hotspot by adding in data from years when a hot spot shouldn’t occur. They mushed the data to fit one part of their model, but it broke in other parts.

Roy Spencer has used new methods to improve the satellite signal of the hot spot, and is “increasingly convinced” the all important mysterious hot spot is really not there, which fits with 28 million weather balloons and humidity data too. Satellites are not particularly good at finding the hot spot because it is a very thin layer over the tropics and satellites peering down from on high find it difficult to measure signals from 10km up and separate them from signals, say 8km up. Radiosondes are much better at resolving the different layers, which is really what matters — only the uppermost layer of water vapor counts, not the total column. Having said that, satellites are pretty handy over the oceans where not many weather balloons get released, and it would be good if we could use them.

See my last post on the missing hot spot if you can’t figure out why I go on and on about this mythical zone. It’s the key flaw in the models that amplifies the effects of CO2, but which study after study, and millions of measurements, show is probably just a bad guess that ought to have died properly long ago.

What Roy Spencer found was confirmation for the twentieth time that the models are wrong about this their major, most important feedback.

“…what is really striking in the above plot is how strong the climate models’ average warming trend over the tropical oceans is in the upper troposphere (+0.35 C/decade, dark red), which I calculate to be about 1.89 times the models’ average surface trend (+0.19 C/decade, dark green). This ratio of 1.89 is based upon the UT weighting function applied to the model average temperature trend profile from the surface to 100 mb (16 km) altitude.

So, what we see is that the models are off by about a factor of 2 on surface warming, but maybe by a factor of 5 (!) for upper tropospheric warming.

…

This is “preliminary” so needs confirmation, but the results are pretty stark.

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9.3 out of 10 based on 66 ratings

Study on 74 million deaths: Cold weather kills 20 times more than heat does.

Of seventy four million deaths (that is quite some study) 7.7% of all deaths could be blamed on “non-optimal” temperatures according to Gasparrini et al in the Lancet. But look closely, and 7.3% of deaths were due to the cold and only 0.4% were due to the heat.

This may be part of the reason people retire to Florida, and not so much to Barrow, Alaska.

The biggest killers were not the heat waves that score the headlines, but the moderate cold. Winter kills. (Time to ban winter?)

Cold weather kills far more people than hot weather

Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings, published in The Lancet, also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells.

“It’s often assumed that extreme weather causes the majority of deaths, with most previous research focusing on the effects of extreme heat waves,” says lead author Dr Antonio Gasparrini from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK. “Our findings, from an analysis of the largest dataset of temperature-related deaths ever collected, show that the majority of these deaths actually happen on moderately hot and cold days, with most deaths caused by moderately cold temperatures.”

The study analysed over 74 million (74,225,200) deaths between 1985 and 2012 in 13 countries with a wide range of climates, from cold to subtropical. Data on daily average temperature, death rates, and confounding variables (eg, humidity and air pollution) were used to calculate the temperature of minimum mortality (the optimal temperature), and to quantify total deaths due to non-optimal ambient temperature in each location. The researchers then estimated the relative contributions of heat and cold, from moderate to extreme temperatures.

What I found really curious was that the death rates due to cold were so low in Sweden, but so high in Italy and Japan?

Around 7.71% of all deaths were caused by non-optimal temperatures, with substantial differences between countries, ranging from around 3% in Thailand, Brazil, and Sweden to about 11% in China, Italy, and Japan. Cold was responsible for the majority of these deaths (7.29% of all deaths), while just 0.42% of all deaths were attributable to heat.

The study also found that extreme temperatures were responsible for less than 1% of all deaths, while mildly sub-optimal temperatures accounted for around 7% of all deaths — with most (6.66% of all deaths) related to moderate cold.

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8.8 out of 10 based on 66 ratings

Thank you UWA — The spectacular collapse of the Lomborg centre radiates “fear”

The new UWA logo?

Bizarrely the UWA debacle has opened many eyes in Australia. People who have never mentioned the climate debate to me are now approaching me to talk about it — aghast that something so tame was treated like an outbreak of Ebola.

The over-reaction to Lomborg’s Consensus Centre is priceless — it has exposed just how much the pro-climate-crisis team are scared of even the tiniest deviation from their religious doctrine. They depend so entirely on their unchallenged “university” authority that the threat of any official dissent could cause the collapse of the whole facade. (What a disaster.)

Figure just how innocuous and banal their target was: The Consensus Centre at UWA wasn’t even going to discuss the climate. Lomborg wasn’t going to work there, he wasn’t going to be paid a salary, and he completely accepts the IPCC scientific position, wild exaggerations and all. He’s not a climate scientist and doesn’t pretend to be one. He is a political scientist who discusses economics. On other campuses and in other contexts, Lomborg tries to find ways to help the environment with smarter spending. Oh the crime, twice removed, to seed an errant thought that doubts the power of windmills and solar panels to stop floods and storms?!

UWA is sending a message to skeptical scientists everywhere that they dare not speak their mind. But this message is too clumsy and public, the world can read between the lines, and the message they see is that this is not a science debate. They might have thought a 97% consensus mattered, now they know that the skeptics at universities can’t speak up.

UWA — reap what ye sow

Years of propaganda have gone into creating the idea that academic pronouncements are the Word of God, that climate change is “settled”, and that people who question it are sub-human leeches paid by big-oil. All that poison just came back to sting the Big-Scare-Campaign. UWA had not trained its own staff or students in the scientific method, or free speech, or to be skeptical — and they paid for it. The intellectual vacuum at UWA was put on show for all to see (and how it sucks). The students and staff did exactly what their UWA training had taught them: protest with passion, but without rational reason. There was no argument given, other than the emotional reaction. Hence the new logo ;- ). Passionis non causa — everything the post-modern uni aims to be.

Global Worriers have overplayed their hand again, and it’s woken up a new layer of people. If the Centre had gone ahead, it would have been crippled in the climate debate anyhow (they weren’t planning to discuss the topic anyhow), yet it would have been cited as proof “deniers” got millions in funding. The illusion that our universities were esteemed places of reason, could have been maintained.

On the night the banishment was announced, the ABC News told Australia that Lomborg was a “controversial academic” (which is code for not respected, not popular, and not eminent). Most curiously he was also described incorrectly as a “scientist” and “dubbed a climate contrarian”. Getting his career wrong is embarrassing for national prime time news. Was it sloppy research, blinded by their devotion to the faith, or was the intention to hide that even climate economics is a sacred taboo? Was the ABC trying to cloak the fact that even climate believers get evicted if they don’t believe enough?

Bjorn Lomborg needs to stay out of the science debate

Meanwhile, Lomborg himself has reminded us how little he knows about science (which makes him qualified for UWA 🙂 ). “We should listen to scientists” Lomborg says in the National Post, not meaning “scientists” as people who follow the scientific method, but “scientists” who are government-approved and hold mainstream views on any complex, unproven topic that happens to be politically correct. Bizarrely, his life’s work is to point out that economists and policy-makers ought be questioned, but here he is saying that consensus-scientists are gods who are always right. Are scientists not human too?

It’s hard to say if he is just saying this to appease the global-bullies, or if this is his genuine belief. So much of what the rational economist says is rational, so it makes no sense that he holds such a simplistic and contradictory notion that most professions need auditing but one profession is “perfect”.

Since he knows so little about science, and the attack dogs hate him no matter what he says, he would be wise to say nothing on the science debate. It’s a realistic thing for him to say he believes the IPCC, he’s not a scientist — and leave it at that.

Skeptical scientists have been his strongest supporters, so his pandering and illogical argument for authority achieves nothing but to burn off the people who are listening to him. As I said, the Consensus Centre was already crippled — it wasn’t going to publish on climate-economics anyway. Instead, it’s gone down in a flaming heap, leaving a blazing message across the sky. We need to be relentless in keeping this case study of the fall of academia in the public conversation. Shame about the reputation of my old alma mater, but then Lewandowsky had already trashed it and the Lomborg assault-team could hardly outdo that.

h/t to an emailer — thank you — that I can’t find. I wish I could…

——————————————-

What next?

Having said it was a brilliant PR coup that it was axed, it would be another brilliant PR coup if it could be reinstated or set up somewhere else. To that end, a lot of good people are working to fix this ridiculous situation.

Nick Cater wrote a column in The Australian last week: ” It must have been something of a shock for Johnson to discover that despite what it says on his business card, he doesn’t actually run the university.”

The Menzies Research Centre is planning to host a symposium on academic freedom on the UWA campus in August. They’re seeking funds to fly in national and international speakers for this important event. Find out how to make a tax deductible donation to the Menzies Research Centre’s Public Fund by clicking here.

From the Australian Taxpayers Alliance wants to run full page adverts supporting academic freedom:

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9 out of 10 based on 114 ratings

Nobel Chutzpah Prize 2015: UN, World Bank need “$89 Trillion” to fix climate

Grey elephant with dollar bill for skin The ambit claims know no bounds. Who else would ask for $89,000,000,000,000? If the evil “more developed” nations pay for their carbon sins, the bill for those 1.3 billion people works out at $70,000 per person by 2030 (babies included).* When the target is 89,000 billion dollars, anything the Global Saviours get, can be painted as “not enough”. (It’s never enough). A trillion in funds is a “tiny”, “insufficient” amount that is “barely adequate”. Compliant journalists will print those headlines. The crowd will pay the money and feel guilty they are not paying more.

Speaking of the loot, the world’s GDP is currently $70 trillion, so asking for $89 trillion is a claim on 8% of all the money turned over in the world economy for a decade and a half. Handsome!

There is a grand array of climate junkets for Global Worriers this year. A gala of red-carpet events culminating in Paris, from November 30 to December 11. The wheeling and dealing is on right now, months ahead — and though they talk about the importance of Paris, I expect that Paris is mostly the cabaret show (like UNFCCC event in Bali that I went to), and it’s the deals being hammered out right now that matter (so write to your Austrlian M.P. today. And can we get links to lists for the politicians of the US, UK, EU, NZ…) h/t Rereke

This is a gambit by the highest orders of bureaucratic power in the West for more power, more money, and virtually no accountability — they’re trying to change the global weather fergoodnesssake. There will always be storms, floods and droughts somewhere in the world. This is not so much about renewable energy as about a renewable cash cow. For people who don’t want to compete in the world of hard business but quite like to be treated as if they were a glorious CEO, this is not bad in the global gravy stakes. There are ego-massaging press conferences, tax deductible trips to Rio, five star hotels, and a “hero” status among the passionate flock of useful idiots.

Part of the trick for such a grand grab is the invisibility of the bill. The bureaucrats sneak silently into bank accounts around the world, a dollar here and a dollar there. Funds come from taxpayers and then through higher electricity, fuel and grocery bills, the money flows from seniors, retired folk, children and the unemployed. Through loans issued by governments and central banks, the payments come through silent inflation, as the value of purchasing power and currencies fall. The payments are almost never labeled. No product is ever produced that needs to be delivered. No one gets a bill in the mail to change the weather.

If they did, there would be riots in the streets.

Ban-Ki-Moon, IMF and World Bank leaders and other UN representative for the climate ministerial, April 2015.

Send more money, $89 trillion more.

Mobilizing the Billions and Trillions for Climate Finance

April 18, 2015:

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9.1 out of 10 based on 94 ratings

Wind farms only 80% effective at CO2 reduction (0% effective at temp reduction). UK to allow homes to stop turbines!

Wind power, cost, renewable energy, efficiency In the latest news about wind-generators, The Australian reports that a new Australian study estimates we wasted $70m on RET* certificates last year because of losses the wind turbines put on the rest of the grid. About a fifth of the CO2 supposedly cut by wind-farms was emitted by the rest of the grid as it ramped up and down trying to cope with the erratic supply from the on-and-off whirly-gigs.

If we double our wind-farms the losses are proportionally even greater (every extra wind farm is even more useless than the one before). With twice as many, all of the wind towers would only be 70% effective. But this is all a wild fantasy overestimate, since the point of wind towers is not to reduce CO2, but to reduce global temperatures, stop storms, and hold back the tides. The 3.5% reduction in total Australian electricity emissions changed global temperatures by 0.00C, hence RET on wind is 100.00% useless, accurate to two decimal places. The Clean Energy Council said they had no answer at all, and wouldn’t talk about it, except to say that Australians like “renewables”.

In other news in from the UK, the new majority conservative government says local residents will soon be able to block new wind farms (which they should have been able to do all along). That will mean no new wind-farms on land in the UK. Hallelujah. Praise be to UKIP for shifting the political landscape there back to something more sane.

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9.1 out of 10 based on 110 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

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REFERENCES

No one will debate skeptics

Graham Richardson, The Australian “Silence of the political lambs”

Cold weather kills far more people than hot weather

UWA — reap what ye sow

Bjorn Lomborg needs to stay out of the science debate

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