BREAKING:All the files from Working Group II of AR5 are now available just as “ahem” the open-and-transparent-IPCC would want them. There are 661 files amongst 1 gigabyte of material. This includes their meeting in Japan, in Jan 2011 and a year later in San Francisco, and then Buenos Aires, 10 weeks ago.
Leaked — Working Group II drafts
Behind the scenes Donna Laframboise finds that there is a layer of aggressive activists who are privvy to the IPCC drafts process, and actively lobbying. WWF are pushing the IPCC to cite the WWF. They helped create Himalaya-gate where the IPCC ridiculously predicted the end of the massive Himalayan glaciers by 2035, and got caught embarrassingly. Donna’s book showed that “two thirds of the chapters in the 2007 IPCC report included among their personnel, at least one individual linked to the WWF. One third of the chapters were led by an WWF-affiliated author.” Apparently nothing much has changed.
The Working Group 2 section of the upcoming IPCC report contains 30 chapters. The third draft of those chapters (known confusing as the Second Order draft internally) has not yet been written, but two earlier versions reside on these sticks. What’s known as the First Order draft runs to 2,465 pages and may be downloaded in full or by chapter below.
The IPCC has confirmed the authenticity of sample documents on these sticks.
Blue data stick zipped, 26 mb – here or here (their meeting in Japan, in Jan 2011)
Gold data stick zipped, 140 mb – here or here (a year later in San Francisco)
Green data stick zipped, 675 mb – here or here (Buenos Aires, 10 weeks ago. )
Pay up, or we’ll turn you into a Hobbit! This is what our public science establishment has reduced itself to?
Science fiction writers have infiltrated universities. They’re running amok, and while it’s all very entertaining (thanks for the laughs) some poor sods (like The Express) might think this is actually science.
Mass extinction forecast with 6C temperature rise
HUMANS will have to become like Hobbits to survive the rapid climate change facing the world, a report claims today.
It says that in the past species have coped with a warming climate by turning to dwarfism.This is because food is less nutritious in a warmer world which means that species have to eat more – and by becoming smaller they can cope with food scarcity.The report published by the Climate News Network also warns that the speed of climate change could lead to mass extinctions partly because many species, form plants to animals, will not have time to adapt.It is based on the work of an international group of 30 scientists looking at the vast fossil deposits in rock strata in Wyoming in the United States, charting the period 55 million years ago when the earth temperature rose suddenly.
One of the clues that these researchers were having a go at us is the name: It’s called the “Bighorn Basin Coring Project” but strangely it was funded by the United States National Science Foundation. Bravo to the satirists posing as scientists, they are putting on an exceptional show of pretending to believe their own material. Dead-pan to the end.
In the next 100 years the combination of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increased temperature could be “catastrophic” for an overpopulated world, according to one of the scientists involved. With food supply drastically reduced, evolutionary forces suggest hobbit-sized humans who needed to eat less would have the greatest chance of survival. These findings are the work of an international group of 30 scientists looking at the vast fossil deposits in rock strata in Wyoming in the US, charting the period 55 million years ago when the Earth’s temperature rose suddenly – as it is expected to do this century.
On that occasion it took 10,000 years for the temperature to rise by 6°C. There were mass extinctions, but the timescale gave some plants and animals time to adapt and move north and south to survive. Many species evolved quickly – dwarfism being one of the most widespread and successful strategies.
What worries the scientists is that this current warming period will take as little as 200 years, if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changeis correct. This gives many long-lived species, for example trees, no time to evolve and migrate.
Righto. So assuming that human civilization today is equivalent to that of miniature horse-like mammals of 55 million years ago (cue raucous canned laugh track) ... we’ll evolve rapidly into Frodo-like beings. A career in basketball will beckon for anyone over five feet! E’Gad a terrifying prospect. I need to sit down.
Here’s a wild stab: pretend that the IPCC was not a joke, it didn’t rely on disproven climate models, and we did get a 6°C rise, even then the “hobbit” theory has a few holes. For one, I imagine the fox-sized Eohippus didn’t have much in the way of managed agriculture, internal combustion engines, irrigation, or mass communication. I’m guessing that our larger offspring might manage to not-die-off-before-childbearing thanks to the slight technological advantage conferred by the Neolithic, industrial and scientific revolutions.
Will farm animals shrink and plants become less nutritious?
Assume for a moment that the ABC was a dedicated team working to serve the public, getting fair rates of pay. Then imagine Australians asked the ABC what salaries they paid their “celebrities”. The ABC team would be happy to provide that list, and surely it could be done in one working day.
Instead the national broadcaster has been hiding those details for two years and has just lost the second appeal. (How much money has it cost to hide the money ABC presenters get?) The ABC gets $1 billion a year from the people of Australia, and it has refused to disclose the details of its $25 million dollar “contractors and consultants” bill, and the salaries of top staff of shows like Media Watch, Four corners, and Mornings with John Faine.
A Freedom of Information request was lodged more than two years ago by the Herald and Weekly Times, seeking access to documents “dealing with salaries, or any payments” paid to program makers working on 13 programs, including those listed above, for the financial year ending 2010.
The BBC was caught paying presenters through personal service companies which allowed those presenters to pay less tax. (Are these the same presenters who advocate “big-government” policies and work to increase tax rates and spend the taxes paid by other citizens? If so, they can hardly pretend they hold an ideological position. Surely this is the definition of “parasitic”.)
The ABC employs 4603 full time employees, and fully 401 of them earned more than $150,000 each. The ABC has wasted taxpayer funds with pathetically weak excuses:
The ABC said the documents it had were exempt from FOI because they were either “program material” or “in relation to program material”.
However, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner said any connection between the pay documents and program material “is so remote that there is not even an indirect relationship between them”.
The ABC then went to the AAT to appeal that decision but was again unsuccessful.
The AAT first made the finding that the ABC could not exempt documents “in relation to” program material but only the material itself, which could include scripts, lyrics and video footage.
“Taking the argument advanced by the (ABC) to its logical conclusion, there would be no documents held by the ABC that are not at least indirectly related to program-making,” said AAT president, judge Duncan Kerr and member Anne Britton.
The only thing clear in this news is that the ABC is not here to serve the public
Even ABC employees must surely recognise that there is no public benefit in concealing the way the ABC uses funds that the public are forced to pay.
The media is the problem.
Australia would not be in the mess that it is in, if we had true investigative media.
Bad policies would be exposed. Bad governments would not get away with disastrous decisions.
By hiding the voices of half of Australia, the ABC costs us far far more than $1 billion a year.
Since when was science “political?” Answer: It’s not, but the institutions and bureaucrats who pretend to be scientists are. In the past, partisan scientists would at least try to hide that and keep up the dispassionate persona that marks a seeker of the truth. Now some scientists wear their bias like a badge.
How do we stop the politicisation of science? Not this way. Daniel Sarewitz argues (weakly) in Nature that we need scientists of both political sides in “expert” panels:
The US scientific community must decide if it wants to be a Democratic interest group or if it wants to reassert its value as an independent national asset. If scientists want to claim that their recommendations are independent of their political beliefs, they ought to be able to show that those recommendations have the support of scientists with conflicting beliefs. Expert panels advising the government on politically divisive issues could strengthen their authority by demonstrating political diversity. The National Academies, as well as many government agencies, already try to balance representation from the academic, non-governmental and private sectors on many science advisory panels; it would be only a small step to be equally explicit about ideological or political diversity. Such information could be given voluntarily.
He’s missing the point
“Expert” science panels should only ever be judged by their science not their politics. A successful panel can judge theories by objective criteria: do they predict the world around us, are they strictly logical, and do they have observational evidence (data) to back them up? With so many incompetent professors and meaningless Nobel Prizes, qualifications don’t guarantee ability anymore. The idea that we could ask “experts” how they vote or tally up their donations to political parties is profoundly unscientific. Nature has lost the plot.
If Daniel Sarewitz wants people to perceive scientists as rising above politics, I hate to say the bleeding obvious, but scientists need to actually rise above politics. Scientists need to stop being activists and start holding logic and evidence above all else, and speak cautiously about their ability to predict the world until they can demonstrate their ability to do it.
What we need are not Democrat-scientists or Republican-scientists, we need scientist scientists.
When some scientists are caught hiding declines, honest upstanding scientists need to denounce them. When good scientists don’t speak up about the bad ones, is it any wonder the public assumes that all of science is as corrupted, sick and self serving as every other human institution?
In climate science the self-correcting mechanism of reality takes an age to winnow the trash from the treasure. Billions can be wasted in the meantime. Compare that to the wizards of Silicon Valley whose products are tested day after day. Who cares about the political inclinations of those technologists? It works, or it doesn’t.
When scientists predict that there will be no more snow, and it snows, there ought to be a price. When a scientist can tell us the rains won’t fill the dams and that our cities need expensive desal plants, and he’s proven wrong yet suffers no loss of reputation or stature (or funds), what does it mean to be a scientist? Nothing. The people trashing the reputation of all scientists are the ones who stay silent while charlatans steal the brand-name and good will of science, and get away with profoundly unscientific behavior.
Government science will end up advocating “big-government”
While real science is apolitical, the human machinery of science has been politicized by the funding mechanism adopted since WWII.
Science is an expensive business. The easiest way to get funded is to ask the government– look how many scientists are doing privately funded research. Since scientists are largely dependent on big-government, it follows that they like big-government, and it’s inevitable that science institutions will gravitate towards supporting big-government parties. It only makes it worse that academia is also a big-government culture, and scientists taught in government schools usually graduate from government funded universities (even if they are private, most of the research funding is from government), and go on to work in government funded research, surrounded by other people who’ve traversed exactly the same path. They all sit around in tea-rooms telling each other why “conservatives” are wrong, but they’ve hardly ever met one, let alone had repeated exposure. Some are such political pre-schoolers they think the “Tea Party” is extreme rightwing because they’ve no idea of what a libertarian is. Those who do know keep their mouth shut, lest it give away any politically “incorrect” inclinations. With few exceptions academia is almost a perfect filter for personality types who don’t compete well in the free market, who have no business experience, are not entrepreneurs, and have little inclination to take risks. The dominant culture keeps the other voices silent (read the comments on the Nature article where non-leftie academics don’t dare reveal their political leaning publicly).
Imagine the hyperventilating headlines: Global warming denier sells TV channel to Arab Oil organisation, pockets $100 million in oil funds. More proof that giant corporate interests pull the strings on the public debate, and that carbon dioxide causes storms, tidal waves, asteroids, and alien attacks!
Skip the Global Hypocrisy Award for 2013 – don’t even bother sending in entries. It’s over.
Al Gore has campaigned for two decades against the evil vice-like grip that fossil fuel polluters have on the media and politics ““The carbon fuels industry — big oil and coal — have a 50-year lease on the Republican Party” (H/t The Telegraph). So the obvious step was for him to spend seven years building a TV empire in order to sell it to an organisation founded, funded and fused with Big Oil.
Al Gore apparently owned about 20% of Current TV (you’ve never heard of it either, right?).
But of course, he really didn’t have a choice, the other large offer coming in was from something far more evil and scary than Big Oil, and that was Big Glenn Beck.
Other suitors who didn’t share Current’s ideology were rebuffed. Glenn Beck’s The Blaze approached Current about buying the channel last year, but was told that “the legacy of who the network goes to is important to us and we are sensitive to networks not aligned with our point of view,” according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
But Al Jazeera just wants to tell the news, right?
While it makes Mr Gore richer, the deal gives Al Jazeera a way to expand its reach in the US. Despite its record of awards and commendations for its international coverage, particularly during the Arab Spring, it has faced an uphill battle in convincing Americans that it is a legitimate news organisation, not a propaganda tool for oil-rich Gulf states or Islamist militants.
Bradshaw Art, Kimberley, Australia. This distinctive style of painting disappeared 7,000 years ago. | Photo TimJN1
Two million years of climate change has made us human — in a ying meets yang contradiction, while climate change destroyed cultures and groups, without it, we would not be who we are. The brutal forces of Nature tested our ancestors with droughts, storms, floods and tidal surges, but if the climate had stayed the same, would we have had Bach, Leonardo, and Newton?
At the end of the day, we have a civilization that allows millions of people to pursue happiness without fear that they will die of dysentery, be murdered by marauding barbarians, or lose their children to slave traders.
We are the lucky bastards at the end of a long line of poor sods who struggled and suffered to stay one step ahead of the reaper.
Here are two stories of studies that suggest dramatic effects of climate change on long lost peoples. The second, below, may finally explain the disappearance of the mysterious well developed aboriginal artform known as the “Bradshaw” style.
Rapid changes occurred 2 million years ago
Some swings occurred so fast they happened in “hundreds of years” – as little as 10 generations in the Olduvai Gorge area.
A series of rapid environmental changes in East Africa roughly 2 million years ago may be responsible for driving human evolution, according to researchers at Penn State and Rutgers University.
“The landscape early humans were inhabiting transitioned rapidly back and forth between a closed woodland and an open grassland about five to six times during a period of 200,000 years,” said Clayton Magill, graduate student in geosciences at Penn State. “These changes happened very abruptly, with each transition occurring over hundreds to just a few thousand years.”
It wasn’t a slow progression of climate, or one big change, it was rapid swings back and forward:
According to Katherine Freeman, professor of geosciences, Penn State, … “There is a view this time in Africa was the ‘Great Drying,’ when the environment slowly dried out over 3 million years,” she said. “But our data show that it was not a grand progression towards dry; the environment was highly variable.”
According to Magill, many anthropologists believe that variability of experience can trigger cognitive development.
The changes happened at the same time we started using tools:
“We show that the environment changed dramatically over a short time, and this variability coincides with an important period in our human evolution when the genus Homo was first established and when there was first evidence of tool use.”
Planetary changes drove the climate:
“The orbit of the Earth around the sun slowly changes with time,” said Freeman. “These changes were tied to the local climate at Olduvai Gorge through changes in the monsoon system in Africa. Slight changes in the amount of sunshine changed the intensity of atmospheric circulation and the supply of water. The rain patterns that drive the plant patterns follow this monsoon circulation. We found a correlation between changes in the environment and planetary movement
How well did those ambitious plans work out? The government solution that aimed to reduce CO2 emissions by 5% achieved a 58% increase instead. Welcome to Case-Study #224 in Government failure.
“The controversial and ineffective Kyoto Protocol’s first stage comes to an end today, leaving the world with 58 per cent more greenhouse gases than in 1990, as opposed to the five per cent reduction its signatories sought.
From the beginning, the treaty that was adopted in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, was problematic.
To reduce Greenhouse emissions: ditch the Kyoto protocol
Without Kyoto the US reduced emissions | Graph: Forbes
The big success story in reducing emissions has nothing to do with nanny-state hope-n-change regulation. The US reduced its emissions by 4% in a single year largely because they shifted from coal to gas.
“As a result of increasing use of gas to make electricity, the market share of coal has declined from 48% in 2008 to 43% in 2011 and likely 37% in 2012. Natural gas will capture approximately 30% of electric generation market share this year, sharply up from 12% in 1990 and 16% in 2000.”
There is an economic crisis out there, but it isn’t the Fiscal Cliff.
The best summary of the economics I’ve seen comes from Mark Steyn.
The bipartisan Super Committee of Super Friends was supposed to find $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction by last Thanksgiving, or plucky little America would wind up trussed like a turkey and carved up by “automatic sequestration.”
Sequestration sounds like castration, only more so: It would chop off everything in sight. It would be so savage in its dismemberment of poor helpless America that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the course of a decade the sequestration cuts would reduce the federal debt by $153 billion. Sorry, I meant to put on my Dr. Evil voice for that: ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THREE BILLION DOLLARS!!! Which is about what the United States government currently borrows every month. No sane person could willingly countenance brutally saving a month’s worth of debt over the course of a decade.
I suppose it’s possible to take this recurring melodrama seriously, but there’s no reason to. The problem facing the United States government is that it spends over a trillion dollars a year that it doesn’t have.
I never thought the Australian economy would look good in comparison but figure that we’ve got a population smaller than California and we’re spread across a land almost as big as the whole US. We are the first world quarry next door to China, Japan, and Korea. Sunny, lucky, and fast asleep at the wheel.
Mark Steyn points out that everyone is spending more than they are getting, but the US is better at it.
Generally speaking, functioning societies make good-faith efforts to raise what they spend, subject to fluctuations in economic fortune: Government spending in Australia is 33.1 percent of GDP, and tax revenues are 27.1 percent. Likewise, government spending in Norway is 46.4 percent and revenues are 41 percent — a shortfall but in the ballpark. Government spending in the United States is 42.2 percent, but revenues are 24 percent — the widest spending/taxing gulf in any major economy.
Big western governments are all drunken spenders, pork barreling their way to electoral bliss by quietly printing the money and loudly pretending they might reach a surplus.
Australia had a bonanza treasure-chest to start with (plus a $20bn surplus) and record terms of trade for the last few years. We could have been saving it up big time, with almost no effort. Instead, in a boom, even the worlds greatest treasurer needs more than five years to Ruin Us.
Go Wayne Swan.
The real crisis is hidden under the fake ones
Bread and circuses anyone? The US Official federal debt is $16 trillion dollars, and if that’s not a big enough drama for Hollywood, the blockbuster is unfunded future liabilities which are somewhere between 80 to 200 trillion dollars, and increasing by two to four “$T” per year. The money coming in to “pay” those bills is about $2.5T a year. There is no arithmetic that makes that work.
If cutting debt by a tenth of a trillion over ten years is a cliff, then balancing the US accounts is a Galactic Black Hole.
Cartoonist John Spooner gets away with saying in text what no one else has said before in The Age: that the skeptics are clawing their way ahead, and winning.
The tide has shifted.
Some excerpts:
WELL, so much for the 2012 apocalypse. If the ancient Mayans ever knew anything about the future, they made a serious miscalculation. The same fate has befallen the international climate change emergency brigade. About $1 billion and 18 “Kyoto” meetings later, the world has agreed to do nothing much more than meet again.
How did this frightening climate threat dissolve into scientific uncertainty and political confusion? What of the many billions of dollars of wasted public resources? Some might blame the “sceptics”, the “merchants of doubt” or the “deniers”. Others point to the global financial crisis.
We can say for certain that many hesitant individuals overcame the pressures of group-think, intimidation and tribal disapproval to have a closer look at the relationship between real science, politics and business.
Christopher Monckton and many other skeptics have been writing to Prof Richard Parncutt who had posted a dissertation telling us “logically” influential climate skeptics should be executed. (His words recorded at Webcite). Below, Monckton points out it is a hate-crime, and he will begin notifying Austrian prosecutors, Interpol, the International Criminal Court, and possibly Australian authorities too. In response, Parncutt unconditionally apologizes and withdraws the suggestion. [For some reason, lots of people can’t see anything at this link, but it works for me. Try cut and pasting <http://www.uni-graz.at/~parncutt/climatechange.html?]
Meanwhile, does John Cook seemingly endorse care enough to post or even tweet or email an objection to the original shocking threat that skeptics should recant or die. So far, no? His ad hominem ambush site (misleadingly called “SkepticalScience“) was referred to as “evidence” by Parncutt. (See also Debunking un-SkepticalScience). Five posts have gone up since Christmas, WUWT has heard from Dana (of Cook’s site), yet neither Dana nor Cook has not issued a single sentence indicating that he doesn’t think killing skeptics is a good idea.* (Dana apparently says privately, We of course don’t agree with giving denialists the death penalty, which is good to hear, though Dana’s baseless namecalling is regrettable). And what of DeSmog? If a skeptic had called for the execution of climate scientists, would they have said nothing?
The University of Graz condemns the appalling threat
Ray S, Monckton, Richard Tol, and others wrote to the Dean at the Uni of Graz, and the Dean replies:
The University of Graz is shocked and appalled by the article and rejects its arguments entirely. The University places considerable importance on respecting all human rights and does not accept inhuman statements. Furthermore, the University of Graz points out clearly that a personal and individual opinion which is not related to scientific work cannot be tolerated on websites of the University.
Monckton gets the threat withdrawn and a full apology
Subject: Death penalty for legitimate scientific dissent
.oOo.
Monckton of Brenchley to Parncutt
Dear Professor Parncutt, – The unhappy history of Austria under the Anschluss should surely lead one to consider the unwisdom of demanding death for those scientists and researchers who today legitimately dissent from the apocalypticist notion that our altering 1/3000 of the atmosphere by 2100 will lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
May I ask you publicly to withdraw your dangerous and offensive demand? Otherwise, the law of Austria – designed precisely to avoid a repeat of the murderous, anti-scientific approach adopted by the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, an approach that you now unspeakably revive – will have to be brought to bear, and you will be prosecuted for your hate-crime.
Since an image of your offending statement was cached before your University realized that you had committed a crime and ordered you to remove your poisonous demand from its website, the evidence against you is clear.
A complaint will go to the Austrian prosecuting authorities unless you are able to notify me within 14 days that you have extinguished your crime by withdrawing your call for the death penalty for the likes of me.
Thanks to Frank Brus, at least one camera is now on YouTube in full, with sound. 🙂 Many thanks to other skeptics who volunteered with other helpful suggestions and ideas: to J.J., Ruth, Jim, and Raymond. Thanks to Steve for info about bit-torrent (at least we don’t have to go there this time).
An excellent talent pool out there. I didn’t even know some people had access to post Very Long Movies on Youtube (1 hour 56 mins.) Some of my favourite points are at the end. Check out the last 15 minutes.
There were two cameras recording at the same time:
View 2 (Front more distant camera)
…
OR (UPDATE) View 1 (Back camera view) closer.
Thanks to Barry Corke for driving hundreds of kilometers with his high tech equipment to record this for no fee at all!
The original post has all the background and information on this video: ABC Doco “UnCut”: Evans, Nova, Minchin and Rose — the full unedited video. Look for the moment when Anna is surprised we agree with CO2 being a greenhouse gas: “How can you be skeptical?” Notice when she describes David’s modeling work as “data entry”.
The videos posted there both had sound glitches after 26 minutes. Thanks to Frank, I think we have fixed it here. If a Youtube becomes available for the other view, I shall add it.
Thank you also to the many people who made a much appreciated Christmas contribution — of all sizes. No tip is too small. I am grateful.
Compare that to the final ABC-Smith&Nasht version that went to air
In the end the “Jo & David segment” was only four minutes long. If they were impartial they would not have spent so much of that four minutes on the “paranoia” and the extra camera-man. Instead they would they have spent, say, two whole minutes showing four graphs, and another minute showing that Jo and David are volunteers, that the big money is on Anna’s side of the debate? What matters more to the Australian debate about whether every family should spend something like $1,000 this year on taxes and fees to reduce the global temperature — the failure of the climate models, or the ABC’s spin on those who resist the government agenda?
Does the Australian taxpayer get value for money with this production, or did they unknowingly fund propaganda and advertising for Labor Party policies?
Would the narrator sum up with the key point that the difference between alarmists and skeptics is that skeptics want observations while the alarmists rely on models? Or that fueling the skepticism is a wealth of data from NOAA, NASA, the Hadley Centre, Argo and weather balloons? Would they have spent 10 seconds explaining that while Jo and David are not climate scientists, David has six degrees in maths and stats including a Phd from Stanford, and both of them won prizes in their areas in university?
Could the doco makers have used proper images of graphs, or did it help the public understand the skeptic case by briefly showing an oblique shaded image, and not explaining the significance of the graph (including that the pre-Argo data is near worthless)?
Richard Parncutt, Professor of Systematic Musicology, University of Graz, Austria, reckons people like Watts, Tallbloke, Singer, Michaels, Monckton, McIntyre and me (there are too many to list) should be executed. He’s gone full barking mad, and though he says these are his “personal opinions” they are listed on his university web site.
For all the bleating of those who say they’ve had real “death threats“, we get discussions about executing skeptics from Professors, wielding the tyrannical power of the state. Was he paid by the state to write these simplistic, immature, “solutions”? Do taxpayers fund his web expenses? (And what the heck is systematic musicology?)
Prof Richard Parncutt says:
“I have always been opposed to the death penalty in all cases…”
“Even mass murderers [like Breivik] should not be executed, in my opinion.”
“GW deniers fall into a completely different category from Behring Breivik. They are already causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of future people. We could be speaking of billions, but I am making a conservative estimate.”
If a jury of suitably qualified scientists estimated that a given GW denier had already, with high probability (say 95%), caused the deaths of over one million future people, then s/he would be sentenced to death. The sentence would then be commuted to life imprisonment if the accused admitted their mistake, demonstrated genuine regret, AND participated significantly and positively over a long period in programs to reduce the effects of GW (from jail) – using much the same means that were previously used to spread the message of denial. At the end of that process, some GW deniers would never admit their mistake and as a result they would be executed. Perhaps that would be the only way to stop the rest of them. The death penalty would have been justified in terms of the enormous numbers of saved future lives.
Recant you foolish deniers or we’ll kill you! Yeah. Welcome to modern scientific debate.
Who should die? Anyone named on Desmog:
Much more would have happened by now if not for the GW deniers. An amazing number of people still believe that GW is a story made up by scientists with ulterior motives. For a long list of climate change deniers and their stories see desmogblog.
So the denier database becomes the “death list”. The list decided by PR experts on a funded smear site, who profit from marketing Green corporations.
But it’s ok, he includes a caveat where he says he didn’t say what I quoted above, so he can later pretend he isn’t discussing real deaths of real people:
Please note that I am not directly suggesting that the threat of execution be carried out. I am simply presenting a logical argument. I am neither a politician nor a lawyer. I am just thinking aloud about an important problem.
And we all feel so much better don’t we?
But seriously, Global warming deniers are the worst vermin on the face of the Earth, worse than holocaust deniers, tobacco deniers and worse than someone who bombs buildings and shoots children en masse:
I don’t think that mass murderers of the usual kind, such Breivik, should face the death penalty. Nor do I think tobacco denialists are guilty enough to warrant the death penalty, in spite of the enormous number of deaths that resulted more or less directly from tobacco denialism. GW is different. With high probability it will cause hundreds of millions of deaths. For this reason I propose that the death penalty is appropriate for influential GW deniers.
Here’s how the deadly reasoning goes
How does he know we are facing disaster?
He knows, because he’s read a blog that pretends to be scientific and it says so. The same site resorts to ad homs, and kindergarden namecalling (like “denier” and “Christie Crocks”) and is debunkedall overtheinternet, but the Prof is too poorly trained in reasoning to spot the cheap tricks, and he didn’t think to search for “SkepticalScience debunked”. Oops.
Finally two hours of entertainment unlike any you’ve seen on TV 🙂
The Media IS the Problem – Part I
When the Smith and Nasht came to our house (on behalf of the ABC) to take footage for the “I can change your mind” documentary, David and I asked fellow skeptic and camera-man Barry Corke if he could film them filming us, so we have our own copy of what happened. He agreed — it was obvious to all of us that we needed some insurance against biased edits. We all knew that petty chicanery was possible. James Delingpole had recently given the BBC three good hours of his time, only to find they trimmed all of his clever answers down, waited for him to have a hypoglycemic vague moment and then crowed about how the great James Delingpole was, can you believe, tongue tied (the failure!)
In the final version that went to air, not only did three of the four key sets of evidence that fuel our skepticism vanish, the editors split and diced sentences to make it appear that David said a sentence he never actually said. He doesn’t think the poorly sited thermometers show the “models were wrong” (we have much better evidence than that); that’s illogical and absurd. Everything I said of any substance was edited out (which I’m kinda proud of). They came all that way to watch me try to convince Anna Rose, then left me with 18 bland words. Perhaps what I discussed (and Anna’s weak replies) was too dangerous, not easy to mock, and they couldn’t ambush Nick Minchin with any experts that could debunk what I said?
Obviously Smith &Nasht were on a fishing trip here (funded by you and me). They were fishing for ways to discredit skeptics. In the end they had to resort to deleting 75% of the evidence, and 100% of my points. Blind commentators later claimed that the bloggers had no credibility. Easy for them to say when they didn’t see most of what we said or the data we presented.
Jo and David’s Kitchen with Anna Rose and Nick Minchin | View 1 (Close camera behind Jo and David)
We were called paranoid for setting up our own recording, but it took one phone call, cost us nothing, and we have a copy, so now (ok, belatedly) the world can decide. Did the ABC fairly represent our views? Were Smith and Nasht serving the public?
There were two independent cameras there on the day:
* UPDATE: For the moment, both these videos have only about 26 minutes of sound. We’re working on an alternative. But it may take a while. (Darn).
View 1 was the main better camera, shot from close up and behind. View 2 is the secondary camera, shot from in front, but more distant. View one is better quality, but you may get tired of looking at my back. All footage thanks to the helpful, talented, Barry Corke.
View 1
UPDATE: These video’s have sound drop-outs from 26 minutes, We’ve found a way to host them in full with sound on youtube. See this post.
View 2
Wise adults are aware that if the editors are not on your side, then all your best moments become invisible, but if you goof it up it’ll be a feature story in Fairfax or the Guardian by the day after tomorrow (as per James). The journalists and editors of taxpayer funded organizations are not even pretending to be impartial anymore. Presumably they justify tossing their journalistic principles to the wind because government-funded-documentary-makers (who are friends of the ABC) “know” the answers to Life, The Universe and Everything, so lies by omission are OK, because the dumb punters might get confused. Alas, once upon a time, a good journalist kept their opinion invisible; now, instead, it’s everything else that’s invisible.
Apologies that this has taken so long to arrange — that Exxon cheque is still missing — but I’m sure people will find this interesting nonetheless. It’s a rare moment when skeptics and believers are in the same room and it’s all caught on camera. Plus, for skeptics who do media work, it’s good practice. (Lesson #1: Bring your own camera).
The Background
Anna Rose and Nick Minchin travelled all over the world (some 65,000 km) with hours of footage, and Jo and David’s kitchen ended up being 4 minutes and 20 seconds of a 60 minute documentary. It’s tough editing hours of footage, but therein lies the skill — the point of the doco was “to change people’s minds”. So the essence of each interview should have been to capture the strongest and weakest points of both sides — to help the audience understand why Anna is so worried about the climate, and why the skeptics are every bit as worried but about corruption, freedom, and the scientific method (not to mention, our National economy).
Where was the Evidence?
David and I made it absolutely clear that we held our positions because of the evidence (between us we mentioned the word “evidence” nearly 100 times). But this wouldn’t have fitted with the theme later in the show where Smith and Nasht get psychologists to explain that it’s really all about “ideology”, and skeptics are skeptics because they’re old white males. (Like Jo right?) An honest doco would have taken care to at least let David and I explain our position. David showed four pieces of evidence that showed the models are wrong, yet the editors completely removed any reference to three of the four key pieces of evidence. This is despite the graphs being filmed twice, and referred to repeatedly by both David and myself in preps and in the filming. Indeed, I mentioned “28 million radiosondes” five times (a reference to the missing hot spot). Later, David pointed out that ignoring the poor siting of thermometers is one way the modelers conceal the failure of their models. The editors jumbled these two aspects together with tricky snipping to suggest that the photos of thermometers were one of our “two” key points of evidence for the failure of the models.
That number is important: we clearly presented four pieces of evidence (1. models overestimated air temperatures from 1990, 2. models overestimated ocean warming since when we started measuring it properly in 2003, 3. models predict a pattern of atmospheric warming — responsible for most of the warming in the models — that is entirely missing from copious weather balloon measurements, and 4. models predict outgoing radiation increases with surface rising surface temperature when satellite measurements show the opposite). But they moved David’s words around (by cutting and pasting) to make it appear he said he presented two pieces (which he never said), and to make it appear as if the dodgy land thermometers were one of those two pieces of evidence. Net result: they actively concealed from the audience, by trickery, the evidence that mattered and that we presented four independent sets of data in support of our position.
Those photos of thermometers show the scientists are being unscientific, and that the media are not reporting banal and obvious problems that no one needs a PhD to understand (which both David and I explained). No sane person would use them as evidence of model failure.
Does it matter? Absolutely. The documentary was funded by the people of Australia so they could understand the debate better, and was advertised as an effort to understand both points of view. The producers can argue they had to entertain people, this was a reality TV show — yet the entertaining points of high conflict were edited out (the times Anna Rose laid out her best ad hom’s and we sliced the points in seconds). The editors went to great trouble to rearrange sentences and images to create the impression that skeptics couldn’t make a decent argument and had little thought behind their case. It would have taken hours to find and splice up separate audio and visual snippets to “create” a false argument. It allowed commentators to declare the bloggers had nothing much of value — just kitchen “science”.
Spare a thought for people in Russia. Its the coldest winter since 1938. Temperatures may hit -25 in Moscow this weekend. They have already hit -50C in Siberia. Twenty-one people froze to death in one day. (See the Telegraph photo gallery)
Russia is enduring its harshest winter in over 70 years, with temperatures plunging as low as -50 degrees Celsius. Dozens of people have already died, and almost 150 have been hospitalized.
The country has not witnessed such a long cold spell since 1938, meteorologists said, with temperatures 10 to 15 degrees lower than the seasonal norm all over Russia.
Across the country, 45 people have died due to the cold, and 266 have been taken to hospitals. In total, 542 people were injured due to the freezing temperatures, RIA Novosti reported.
Let me see if I’ve got this straight — the Australian Press Council manages media standards in Australia, but isn’t doing it well enough according to Mr Finklestein (and fellow regulators), who want it overhauled. They want newspapers to be regulated so they can be as trusted as the ABC “is”.* So Finklestein thinks the ABC complaints process works well, and the APC one is too weak.
This week the ABC announced it was fine to equate skeptics to pedophiles as a researched comment by a host on a “science” show, while at the same time, the APC ruled that it was not fine for a skeptic who used loose satirical colourful language in a newspaper column to repeat a quote from an angry farmer who used the word pedophile to describe wind-farm operators.
DRAWING comparisons to pedophiles to attack your opponents is acceptable under the ABC complaints process – held up as the ideal model by media inquiry head Ray Finkelstein – but has been ruled out of order by the newspapers’ existing regulatory body.
But two decisions this week reveal the APC is tougher on commentators who compare opponents with pedophiles.
James Delingpole wrote an article on May 3 about windfarms:
(he) … quoted an unnamed sheep farmer who said that the “wind-farm business is bloody well near a pedophile ring. They’re f . . king our families and knowingly doing so.”
In response Delingpole says: Australia you are so totally gay. “Australia handed in its testicles to the progressives long ago.” (the) state broadcaster ABC is so hysterically left-wing it makes the BBC look like Fox News… ” like the anonymous sheep farmer I quoted, I feel that the “level of offensiveness” is entirely justified when applied in the context of perhaps the vilest, greediest, most corrupt, mendacious and wantonly destructive industries currently operating anywhere in the world.”
Me, I’d prefer if people left the word pedophilia for debates about pedophiles. But that is for the public to discuss, not a committee to decide. The point here is the hypocrisy of “regulators”. The APC is supposedly not strong enough, but it objected to Delingpole using the term “a kind of government-endorsed Ponzi scheme” to describe how union superfunds profit from wind farms that would not exist if governments didn’t force Australians to pay for them. Was that in the public interest?
The APC found those comments above by Delingpole on May 3 were highly offensive and not justified in the public interest. But these comments below, made on the ABC during something called a “Science” show, are, according to the ABC, quite ok.
During a November 24 broadcast of The Science Show, Williams said: “What if I told you that pedophilia is good for children, or that smoking crack is a normal part and a healthy one of teenage life, to be encouraged? You’d rightly find it outrageous. But there have been similar statements coming out of inexpert mouths again and again in recent times, distorting the science.”
Two weeks ago, it was all over the news. The ocean near Perth (where I live) was rising at the terrifying rate of 9-10mm per year since 1993, which was, shockingly, “three times the global average”. (Since Perth is flatter than flat, at this rate, in a few years everything bar Kings Park and a few sky-scrapers would be washed away). The myth started because a government department that knows a lot about our roads, trains, and buses wrote a dot point in a Fact Sheet. That was the State of Australian Cities report, and a pollie (Albanese) raved. Then the West Australian newspaper headlined it, and it all got out of hand.
In contrast, Chris Gillham got the raw data (something you’d think The Department of Infrastructure might have thought of), and shows below why its nonsense on stilts. The rate is not measured from when records began, but from 1993, which (surely it’s just a coincidence) also happens to be the lowest level in local tide gauges since 1941. (See that second last “dip” near the right-end in the graph below?) If they’d started the “rate” from the year 1999, the headlines would tell us the seas were falling…
If that’s not bad enough, the sea level data comes from two spots, 20 km apart (Hillarys and Fremantle), and Gillham points out that the rates are quite different. Apparently parts of Perth are subsiding by as much as 6mm year thanks to groundwater extraction, and one of those parts doing-the-subsiding happens to be around a tide gauge. More than half the scary rise is due to the gauge sinking.
As far as global sea levels go, Fremantle is a rare long record from the Southern Hemisphere, and is based on a very stable continent — shame about that aquifer that’s mucking up the record. Odd how mistakes, like not-correcting-for-the-subsidence make their way past scientists, bureaucrats, department heads, ministers, and then journalists too. Doesn’t anyone check these any more? Are they all incompetent, or in the grip of a mind-numbing religion perhaps?
All credit goes to Chris for doing so much research here. — Jo
100 years of tidal records at Fremantle show a fairly steady small rise. Note how high the oceans were in the 1940’s and how low it was in 1993. Given past rises and falls, why are we getting excited about a rise since the dip in 1993? (Data: Bureau of Met.)
Guest post: Chris Gillham
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Perth sea level myth swamped by a rising tide of facts
A myth was started in early December that sea levels off the Perth coastline have been rising at 9-10mm per year since 1993, three times the global average. The West Australian newspaper published a page 3 story quoting a State of Australian Cities report that Perth sea levels have been rising far quicker than anywhere else, which Federal Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese described as “disturbing” and “extraordinary”. The foreboding news was quickly propagated by other mainstream media and the sea level myth took hold.
The facts
Closer analysis of the claim shows it is based only on a selective comparison of 1993 and 2010 sea levels off Perth that are monitored by tide gauges in Fremantle and Hillarys. The averaged mean sea level at Fremantle in 1993 was the lowest recorded since 1941, which makes it an extraordinary year for comparison since this critical fact is ignored by a Federal Government department, a Federal Cabinet Minister and the media. The mean sea level at Fremantle and Hillarys was higher in 1999 than in 2010, the most recent year of publicly available data, and a comparison of averages in the first and second halves of the 18 years since 1993 shows sea levels have risen about .61mm per year at Fremantle and 2.2mm per year at Hillarys.
Not quite so disturbing or extraordinary, is it?
Fremantle sea levels 1993 – 2010 (Note the high point was 1999)
That sinking feeling
If you’re curious about how sea levels can rise at such different rates, it’s worth noting a university report published by the Journal of the Royal Society of WA in April 2012:
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