The organisers behind the 1992 Earth Summit, which this week’s meeting commemorated, were shocked and took the extraordinary step of denouncing the agreement in front of key UN officials at a private dinner of the conference’s great and good. Maurice Strong, who ran the previous summit, called it a “weak” collection of “pious generalities”, while former Norwegian premier Gro Harlem Brundtland – whose report gave rise to the 1992 meeting – said governments had “forgotten about the environment”. And Nick Clegg, who led the British delegation, revealed that the Government felt the result fell so far below expectations that it had considered “pulling the plug” on the whole thing.
It was so bad, the crowd even hints at the End of the UN. (Crack that champers!).
…as one top international official privately put it to me: “The UN could not survive many more meetings like this.” And there are increasing signs that businesses and some governments are getting fed up.
Oxfam are calling it a hoax summit. “They came, they talked, but they failed to act,” said Barbara Stocking, the chief executive of Oxfam. ”
Washington post: Rio + 20 “may produce one lasting legacy: Convincing people it’s not worth holding global summits…”
Looks like it might be party time for the worlds free citizens — no damage achieved by the UN (apart from the scandalous waste of money and resources used to clock up nothing but a neat networking op for political powerbrokers).
Yes – they did get the free lunch, but not the free global bureaucracy.
Climate Depot – Marc Morano, Craig Rucker and Christopher Monckton were there on the ground.
Morano delivered the press conference that told the UN that failure at Rio means success for the world:
Failure here is good for the world’s poor people. Failure is the only option for this conference if you care about the environment and poor people. Carbon based energy has been one of the greatest liberators of mankind in the history of our planet.
I wrote yesterday about the unprecedented way the UN was locking out anyone at Rio that was not part of an official government delegation. More than ever before, the UN is not even pretending to to serve the people of the world. Even the facade is gone. The rules have changed since Monckton, Watts Up and the internet spoiled the party at Durban.
All the heroic NGO’s have been blocked from the negotiations (as well as those evil free market libertarians). They are only there for the theatrics. The real action goes on behind closed doors, in what Monckton calls a “concrete bunker”.
The global coming together is not united. It’s separate conferences for the VIP’s and the riff-raff now. There’s a tent city darkly called “The People’s Congress” — which used to be near the main plenary sessions hall, but has been moved miles away. (Who needs “The People?”).
“Then the non-government organizations have been “corralled in the filthy, soulless, crumbling Rio Centro conference center, where hundreds of armed, sharp-suited UN goons kept them determinedly away.”
“Thirdly, to symbolize the total separation of the governing class from the governed that will become the norm as the UN takes power, the governmental delegates, traveling in a thousand-strong fleet of gas-guzzling, carbon-emitting limousines escorted by secret police on Harley-clone motorcycles, have been kept in near-total isolation from the non-government organizations and from the mere people.”
“If somebody hides something, it is because somebody has something to hide.”
Monckton explains why the UN is so afraid of the draft text leaking
The journalists are allowed in apparently, possibly because there is no danger of them reporting what is actually going on. (After all, environmental journalists are on a good junket too.)
So why the obsessive secrecy? Why are the national negotiators kept away from the non-government organizations that have always had access to them until now? Why are the updated negotiating texts not made available? One reason stands out. The UN knows perfectly well that if the people knew what was being inserted into the generally anodyne negotiating text they would not stand for it.
FWIW, I am a hard core skeptic. I’m the “target” of your analysis. As such, what folks like me think ought to be particularly important to you. So a bit of history on me and climate change.
I first came to the AGW issue thinking “Gee, this looks important, I ought to learn more about it.” At the Skeptic sites (like WUWT) I had generally kind acceptance and explanation of where I had parts missing from my understanding of the “issues” about AGW and where it was “gone wrong”. At “Believer” sites (an curiously appropriate term as it has all the hallmarks of a religious belief) I would ask simple and innocent questions and largely get derision in return. Simply asking “But doesn’t CO2 have a log limit on absorption effects that we have passed?” or worse, saying “But this article (on skeptic site) seems to have a valid issue.” would bring “Attack the messenger” responses. That, for me, was the first and largest clue about which side was indulging in propaganda more than in dispassionate examination of facts and data.
So I set about a long path of “learning for myself”.
At Believer sites, I’d have a load of links shoved down my throat with, effectively, “You idiot, read all this first or shut up”… At Skeptic sites I’d get “Well, here are some links, and the net-net is that the data are lousy and the models do not predict. But check it out yourself.” Hardly something to make one feel like Believers were doing decent unbiased examination of the facts.
But I read a lot of the links anyway. Most of them were of the form “Given the assumption that AGW is real, what bad thing happens?” Many more were of the form “Assuming the theory is correct, what does our model show?” While all of that is interesting speculation, none of it is really what I’d call Science. Where are the data? The analysis? The testable hypothesis? Etc. In short, where is the SCIENCE in “Climate Science”? (In most part it really ought to be called “Climate Model Storytelling” once you get to the end of the papers.)
At the core of it all, I found the general truth that there was Agenda Driven Politics. What published papers could be bought to support a pre-designed Agenda for political change. (Only much later did I find the Agenda 21 site at the UN and found the source of The Agenda… but it was nice to find that my earlier conclusion was supported by the facts.) The more I looked at the AGW “Science” claims, the more I found flawed and politically driven papers being written “for effect” with little in the way of actual unbiased search for truth.
According to Greenpeace its an “epic fail”. WWF says its a “colossal failure”, and it’s so bad, Oxfam want to start all over again. That news may sound good to the free citizens of the West, but that’s only because we aim so low.
They may not get as much as they aim for, but they will still get what they came for.
Rio 2012: How big is this junket?
[It is] “billed as the biggest UN event ever organised. This time, 15,000 soldiers and police are guarding about 130 heads of state and government, as well as ministers and diplomats from 180 countries and at least 50,000 others.”
So 50,000 people got a trip to Rio. They may want world peace, free energy, and control over your light bulbs, your car, and your wallet, but most of them still got an expenses paid ticket to the Olympics of Global Bureaucracy. In the end they may say they are disappointed, but in reality they still scored one heck of a free lunch. And this is the point. As long as the masses are not saying that they want their money back, the show is a success. The junket is the point. The headlines crying “failure” are still advertising the meme. The world is still talking about hopes of environmental campaigners, not about the waste of money; Not about the 200,000 people starved by biofuel policies (and that was just the tally for 2010).
This week Nature Climate Change published the Bain et al letter about ways to “promote pro-environmental action in climate change deniers”. How does Nature define this group? They imply that deniers deny science, but can the researchers, editors or reviewers name any peer reviewed paper with empirical evidence that the deniers deny? Surely this whole paper is not based on a name-calling assumption, a confusion about an illusory sub-species, Homo sapiens denier? Could Nature now be the Journal of UnScience? We shall see…
I have written to ask the lead researcher Dr Paul Bain:
Dear Dr Paul Bain,
Right now, it’s almost my life’s work to communicate the empirical evidence on anthropogenic climate change.
I can help you with your research on deniers. I have studied the mental condition of denial most carefully. There is a simple key to converting the convictions of people in this debate, and I have seen it work hundreds of times. Indeed, my own convictions that lasted 17 years were turned around in a few days. I can help you. It would be much simpler than you think.
Firstly, to save time and money we must analyze the leaders of the denial movement. I have emailed or spoken to virtually all of them.
They are happy to accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and causes warming, that humans produce CO2, that CO2 levels are rising, and that the earth has warmed in the last century. According to Hansen et al 19841, Bony et al 20062, and the IPCC AR4 report3, the direct effect of doubling the level of CO2 amounts to 1.2°C (i.e. before feedbacks).
All they need is the paper with the evidence showing that the 1.2°C direct warming is amplified to 3 or 4 degrees as projected by the models. Key leaders in the denial movement have been asking for this data for years. Unfortunately the IPCC assessment reports do not contain any direct observations of the amplification, either by water vapor (the key positive feedback4) or the totality of feedbacks. The IPCC only quotes results from climate simulations.
Since science is based on observations and measurements of the real world, it follows that a denier of science (rather than a denier of propaganda) must be denying real world data. I’d be most grateful if you could explain what “deniers” deny. Deniers repeatedly ask for empirical evidence, yet must be failing badly at communicating that this is the crucial point because none of the esteemed lead authors of IPCC working Group I seem to have realized that this paltry point is all that is needed. All this mess could be cleared up with an email.
The evidence for anthropogenic global warming is overwhelming, so the observations they deny must be written up many times in the peer review literature, right? After five years of study I am still not sure which instrument has made these key observations. Do deniers deny weather balloon results, or satellite data, or ice cores?
When you find this paper and the measurements, it will convince many of the key denier leaders. (But being the exacting personality type that they are, deniers will also expect to see the raw data. So you’ll need to also make sure that the authors of said paper have made all the records and methods available, but of course, all good scientists do that already don’t they?)
As a diligent researcher, I’m sure you would not have described a group with such a unequivocally strong label unless you were certain it applied. It would be disastrous for an esteemed publication like Nature to mistakenly insult Nobel prize winning physicists, NASA astronauts, and thousands of scientists who have asked for empirical evidence, only to find that the Nature authors themselves were unable to name papers (or instruments) with empirical evidence that their subject group called “deniers” denied.
If those papers (God forbid) do not exist, then the true deniers would turn out to be the researchers who denied that empirical evidence is key to scientific confidence in a theory. The true deniers would not be the skeptics who asked for evidence, but the name-calling researchers who did not test their own assumptions.
The fate of the planet rests on your shoulders. If you can find the observations that the IPCC can’t, you could change the path of international action. Should you find the evidence, I will be delighted to redouble my efforts to communicate the empirical evidence related to climate change.
Awaiting your reply keenly,
Joanne Nova
—————–
REFERENCES
1 Hansen J., A. Lacis, D. Rind, G. Russell, P. Stone, I. Fung, R. Ruedy and J. Lerner, (1984) Climate sensitivity: Analysis of feedback mechanisms. In Climate Processes and Climate Sensitivity, AGU Geophysical Monograph 29, Maurice Ewing Vol. 5. J.E. Hansen and T. Takahashi, Eds. American Geophysical Union, pp. 130-163 [Abstract]
2 Bony, S., et al., 2006: How well do we understand and evaluate climate change feedback processes? J. Clim., 19, 3445–3482.
3 IPCC, Assessment Report 4, 2007, Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 8.6.2.3. p630 [PDF].
4 IPCC, Assessment Report 4, 2007, Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 8. Fig 8.14, p631 [PDF] see also Page 632.
5 Bain et al (2012) Promoting pro-environmental action in climate change deniers, Nature Climate Change volume 2, pages600–603
——————
NOTE to commenters: This post refers to the term “deniers” so I expect the word to be used in comments as appropriate. But the point of discussion here is to define exactly what it is that “deniers” deny, not to toss insults.
UPDATE: A reply from Paul Bain
Credit to him for replying promptly. It is a start, at least, to the conversation. — Jo
Comments about the use of the “denier” label are a fair criticism. We were focused on the main readership of this journal – climate scientists who read Nature journals, most of whom hold the view that anthropogenic climate change is real. There was no intention to make comparisons with Holocaust denial, as some skeptics have claimed was our deliberate intention. Rather it should be noted that describing skepticism as denial is a term increasingly used in the social science literature on climate change (e.g. in Global Environmental Change, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Society), and is used informally by some within the climate science community. So we were using a term that is used and understood in the target audience, but which we thought involved a stronger negative stereotype (e.g. being anti-environmental, contrarian) than skeptic. My thought was this would highlight the contrast with the data, which suggests that you need not believe in AGW to support pro-environmental action, especially when it had certain types of (non-climate) outcomes (demonstrating a non-contrarian position). So in my mind we were ultimately challenging such “denier” stereotypes. But because we were focused on our target audience, it is true that I naively didn’t pay enough attention to the effect the label would have on other audiences, notably skeptics, especially because I don’t have the “denier=Holocaust denier” association that some of your co-travellers do – these people all pointed to the same single quote that I wasn’t aware of, and now that I am aware of it I can say I personally disagree with it. Although I hope this helps explain our rationale for using the term, I regret the negative effect it has had on the debate and I intend to use alternative labels in the future.
Beyond the negative reaction to “denier”, what has been interesting in many skeptics’ responses (in emails and on blogs) is that our research is propaganda designed to change (or “re-educate”) their mind about whether AGW is real, and I’ve received many long emails about the state of climate science and how AGW has been disproven (or about the lack of findings to prove it, as you highlighted in your email). Actually, the paper is not about changing anyone’s mind on whether anthropogenic climate change is real. There are also skeptics insisting that the issue is ONLY about the state of the science – whether AGW is real – but on this point I disagree. I am approaching this as a social/societal problem rather than as an “AGW reality” problem. That is, two sizeable groups have different views on a social issue with major policy implications – how do you find a workable solution that at least partly satisfies the most people?
Some climate scientists who endorse AGW seem to have assumed that the way to promote action is to convince skeptics that in fact AGW is occurring, and this has not been effective. Similarly, I don’t think skeptics will convince those who endorse AGW that they are wrong anytime soon. But the social/policy issue remains, whether you believe in AGW or not. So if policies are going to be put in place (as many governments are proposing), what kinds of outcomes would make it at least barely acceptable for the most people? For our skeptic samples, actions that promoted warmth and economic/technological development were the outcomes of taking action that mattered to them (even if they thought taking action would have no effect on the climate). So our studies showed that these dimensions mattered for skeptics to support action taken in the name of addressing anthropogenic climate change. The might also be other positive outcomes of taking action we didn’t study where some common ground might be found, such as reducing pollution or reliance on foreign oil. Overall, the findings suggest that if there was closer attention to the social consequences of policies, rather than continuing with seemingly intractable debates on the reality of AGW, then we might get to a point where there could be agreement on some action – some might think the action is pointless with regard to the climate (but many other people think it will), but if it produces some other good outcomes it might be ok. Hence, if governments were able to design policies that plausibly achieved these “non-climate” goals, then this might achieve an acceptable overall outcome that satisfies the most people (although admittedly not everybody will agree).
This is the message of our paper, and I hope readers of your blog will be able to accept my regret about the label and focus on the main message. Some have described this message as naïve, but a real-world example (noted by one of our reviewers) illustrates the general point: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/science/earth/19fossil.html?pagewanted=all
No one says it quite like Rupert. Reprinted with permission, thank you. Read, enjoy the vivid panoply,
— Jo
My favourite extract — the 26 ethical flaws of propagandists
(For the full letter and context go straight to the post below – apologies to Rupert for discontinuous edits)
Climate change major risks: Such as? There is not one shred of empirical evidence for your assertion. There is, of course, an ocean of mendacious and fraudulent computer modelling by people with vast vested interests in promoting the scam.
You state that you do not underestimate my ‘strength of feeling on this important issue’. With respect, you are well wide of the mark. I have no strong feelings about climate change. Climate change is fact of life and, in that sense, is a banality. I do, however, have a prejudice against blatant chicanery and outright knavery.
Neither is this, anyway, a scientific issue. The science is clear. There have been and are no untoward changes in global climate outside those which flow from natural variability. There have been no recent climatic phenomena, which do not have numerous precedents. CO2 has nothing to do with the matter.
On the other hand it is an ethical issue. The ethical considerations arise from the activities of propagandists when:
they seek to howl down any form of questioning or dissent,
they use threatening vilification as a propagandist tool,
they damage the careers of those who have the temerity to question their dogma,
they wilfully and knowingly misrepresent data,
they wilfully and knowingly suppress contra-indicative data,
they claim data to be authentic and rigorous when, in reality, it is cherry picked from partisan environmentalist propaganda material,
they undermine scientific method by refusing to disclose and share data/methodology,
they wilfully subvert and prostitute their calling for personal gain and self-aggrandisement,
they subvert hitherto trusted forums of scientific discussion and dissemination,
they subvert the independence of peer review as a legitimate check and balance,
they abuse the young by indoctrinating deviant ‘science’,
they lay waste to the environment with worthless and hideously expensive machines (wind/tidal turbines) as well as other devices such as photo-voltaic cells,
they oppress the poor by diverting land usage from food crop cultivation to uneconomic and inefficient mono-crop cultivation of so-called biofuels,
they wilfully associate their personal conceits and financial interests with massive environmental pollution in the developing world,
they are complicit, for the same reasons, in rainforest and other forms of environmental destruction,
they manipulate the fiscal arrangements of entire countries on the basis of demonstrable falsehood,
they spread lies designed to intimidate poorly educated and/or gullible populations,
they claim economic insights based upon false assumptions, corrupted data and outright lies,
they sustain vast departments of state to promote falsehood and scaremongering,
they subsidise supposed independent pressure groups for the purpose of surreptitiously encouraging partisan lobbying,
they lend succour and support from the safety of privileged positions, inherited and otherwise, to villains and scientific charlatans,
they seek to close off and monopolise what should be legitimate debate on a controversial matter of importance, again from behind barricades created by privilege,
they ostentatiously ignore whatever is inconvenient to their tendentious paradigm, however distinguished and credible the sources may be,
they whitewash arrant knavery,
they distort, in furtherance of their mendacity, the normal accepted meaning of language,
they subvert the hitherto trusted organs of mass communication.
The questions are how to mitigate the damage/how to hold to account those responsible for it!
Sorry the site was down twice yesterday. We are still figuring out what happened. It’s probably innocent, but we won’t know for sure until we’ve gone through the logs which are monstrous.
I suspect that restoring all 100k comments (lost to data corruption after the transfer of my blog) may have set the traffic over the limit with recaching from many automated spider bots and what-not’s that needed to update all 824 pages and 100,000 comments at once. The log files of the action on my site the last few days are huge, so it will be some time to sort out what happened. I gather the servers may have thought they were under attack and shut down.
When trouble strikes the site, check out my Twitter accountfor info. Don’t forget to follow @JoanneNova.
So why did I move the site in May?
Last year we did get a denial of service attack in June. We decided with that and the increasing costs, we needed to move the site to cheaper, more secure US servers. That move, and all the traffic went very smoothly, but cost more than $6000 over the year. And even on the cheaper servers, the ongoing bandwidth was still costing $300 per month, so when a dedicated skeptic, who also managed other wordpress blogs as a business, offered to help out with very reduced costs, I could not help but say “Yes Please”.
Hence the site was moved again to another server in the US last month. Because the site is so large not surprisingly there have been a few hiccups in the weeks since we switched it over. We should be fine, though there may be more hiccups in the coming days. This new server location will be a lot cheaper to operate in the long run.
If I was funded by Exxon we wouldn’t have quite so many drama’s in the switch, because we would be paying commercial rates which would be around $10,000 per annum I hear. 😉
I have no doubt the new web manager is doing an excellent job, but obviously he has paid work to attend too, and is packing in this new large role in spare time in between.
Apologies for the inconvenience. I trust readers will understand, and if we do turn up anything untoward or unexpected about the “Suspended” notice, I’ll post an update here. For the moment, assume it was one of those things that happen to large complexes of software and databases.
Cheers,
Jo
Here’s a brief synopsis of the events which took place in relation to this website – David T. (web thingy guy).
TLDR; not a government conspiracy.
Jo contacted me about the enormous costs of keeping her website up and I related that I purchase hosting bandwidth at wholesale prices out of the US. So, we took the site down for a couple of days and moved servers. Everything seemed to be OK. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen technical issues unrelated to the new website hosting solution, we lost a whole bunch of data about a week after the move. This issue has since been resolved.
We ended up losing almost a weeks worth of data since the previous backup. That data has been recovered but is still yet to be integrated back into the website. The server went down yesterday as a probable result of being re-crawled by Google though, I’m still analyzing the logfiles to confirm. And seeing as the logs grow by over a megabyte everyday, the analysis is slow going. For those who are not technically inclined here’s a short explanation.
Basically, this website is dynamically generated out of a database. Upon request, the result of the generated page is saved as a cached file. This is so the CPU and database don’t have to do any additional work to render the page on every additional request. Only when someone posts a comment. When Google visits your website, it requests as many pages as it can find. With our comments restored our cache needed to be updated so the CPU got hung up dynamically generating every page across the website from the database rather than as a cache file.
So, as a result, my technical support in the US disabled this website as the CPUs were hanging to the point of almost crashing the server. We stepped through a number of website upgrades and efficiency measures during that afternoon until I was satisfied the website would be OK. I checked the website before going to bed and all seemed fine…
At 2:30am we got another hit on the CPU. What I love about my web host providers in the US is their insane paranoia when it comes to security. The next CPU hang triggered an automated script which disables the web account until action can be taken to rectify the problem. This exists to terminate a denial of service attack so that every account running off the server doesn’t lose their website, and more importantly, their email. First thing this morning I have opened my inbox and discovered Jo’s site has gone down. Within an hour we put a resolution in place and arranged an action plan should the same event happen again. Short of writing my own bot and crawling the website, I don’t know if another crawl will take the site down. But, there is now a plan in place to gather data at a network level(beneath the server) to identify and implement a permanent fix should our current efforts be inadequate.
The state of the website at the moment can best be described as functional. We have recovered most of the comments lost and are working to splice those that are still missing into the database. It has been a complex process of weaving some database building scripts and webpage scrappers while firing them onto flat database dump files to create some execution scripts to run on the live server. This is all to marry three separate datasets together, all with conflicting references and placeholders. Not a simple issue.
I understand that 12 hours can be an eternity in internet time so, whenever any issues arise I do my best to resolve them as soon as possible. I appreciate your understanding in this matter and hope that answers any questions you may have concerning the various issues related to this site.
A team of independent auditors, bloggers and scientists went through the the BOM “High Quality” (HQ) dataset and found significant errors, omissions and inexplicable adjustments. The team and Senator Cory Bernardi put in a Parliamentary request to get our Australian National Audit Office to reassess the BOM records. In response, the BOM, clearly afraid of getting audited, and still not providing all the data, code and explanations that were needed, decided to toss out the old so called High Quality (HQ) record, and start again. The old HQ increased the trends by 40% nationally, and 70% in the cities.
So goodbye “HQ”, hello “ACORN”. End result? Much the same.
That meant the ANAO could avoid an audit, since the BOM had changed data-sets, the point of auditing the old set was moot.
For me, this version is so much worse than the previous one. In the HQ data set the errors could have been inadvertent, but now we’ve pointed out the flaws, there can be no excuses for getting it wrong. Instead of fixing the flaws (and thanking the volunteers), it’s almost as if they’ve gone out of their way to not solve them. Instead it’s been complexified, rushed, has many typo’s and gaps, and the point (see below) about the “adjustments having no impact” — when they obviously do — begs to be audited by the Auditor General, the ACCC, Four Corners (ha ha) and 60 Minutes.
To make it all look o-so-convincing, the BOM asked three experts (from NOAA, NZ, and Canada) to look over it all, and score the BOM against its peers. But the peers standards are not too high in the first place: NOAA was caught with 89% of it’s own thermometers in the wrong spots near air conditioners and whatnot, and NZ’s records were so bad, they disowned them themselves. (NZ adjustimongered their temperature trends from 0.06C right up to 0.9C, got caught, and their response under legal pressure was to say but it’s ok, “There is no “official” or formal New Zealand Temperature Record”.)
How useful is it when a team of substandard institutions is asked to evaluate whether the BOM practices are “amongst international best practice” when it is international best practice to ignore concrete, car-parks, tarmac, and lose the data too? We aren’t impressed if the BOM is as bad as the rest of the world, we want open data, transparent methods, and reproducible results. We want high quality to mean, well, high… quality.
So how good is the new ACORN (Australian Climate Observations Reference Network — Surface Air Temperature) set?
Because it covers a vast area, Alice Springs contributes 7-10% of the national signal.
ACORN and the BOM claim that since the new results are pretty much the same, really they give more confidence than ever that Australia has warmed since 1960.
Ken Stewart and the independent BOM analysts team have sliced and diced through the ACORN data.
They conclude:
Like the old HQ series, the Acorn record is also still impossible to replicate.
The record is much shorter than 100 years for many sites. It’s supposed to be high quality, but it has many gaps and spurious errors. If volunteers can write code on laptops to check for errors — and find, for example, that one 36.8C was accidentally changed to a 26.8C (and there are many) why can’t the Australian BOM?
Like the old series, Acorn’s trends are very different from what the raw data shows. (Why do we bother with thermometers?)
Hot and cold extremes have been adjusted, for the most part warming winters and cooling summers, and at some sites new and more extreme records have been set.
Too tricky by half? The BOM tries to hide the effect of adjustments
Here’s a piece of sleight of hand — ACORN, they claim, has a random set of a adjustments of both up and down (which is what we’d expect).
“There is an approximate balance between positive and negative adjustments for maximum temperature but a weak tendency towards a predominance of negative adjustments (54% compared with 46% positive) for minimum temperature.”
But the independent auditors point the positive adjustments are larger than the negative:
While there may be a numeric balance of positive and negative adjustments, analysis of a representative sample indicates that adjustments predominantly increase warming.
This is for me the most sinister point. Recall that Dr David Jones, Head of Climate Monitoring and Prediction, National Climate Centre, Bureau of Meteorology, stated clearly that the adjustments made “a near zero impact on the all Australian temperature”. Knowing that critics were drawing attention to that statement and pointing out it was not so, the BOM apparently paid attention themselves to this matter. That’s fair enough, perhaps it was an honest oversight. But having been notified of the bias, they then went on to create a situation where they can state a half-truth which makes it appear his statement is true, while in reality is it still not. Is it just incompetence, or something worse? Did they not check the overall effect of their adjustments? Did they think that no one else would do that?
ACORN’s complicated methodology
Ken Stewart points out that in the CAWCR Technical Report No. 049 by Blair Trewin, it appears that the BOM are using a new technique to homogenize and “correct” the data which involves comparing the data to the 40 nearest neighbors. But the stations are still very far apart. As many as 20% of them are more than 100km away from their closest neighbor. Just how far apart are some stations which are being compared?
Sloppy language works for cheats and charlatans. In the search for the truth only accurate language will do. Orwell understood the power of language to change the way we think, indeed to fence off some possible options completely.
All the way back on May 9th 1992, UN defined “climate change” as man-made. See The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, (paragraph 6):
“Climate change is defined by the Convention as “change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods” (article 1 (2)).”
In other words, there is no “climate change” without humans because there cannot be, and by extension, the climate did not change, could not have, for the 4.5 billion years before 1880 when the first coal powered electricity station was fired up.
Such nonsense is what international treaties are made of. Only millions of taxpayer dollars could have propagated an inanity so profoundly inane, and so abjectly silly. No mere student report could have swept around the world destroying sensible conversation for two decades (and taking the entire field of paleoclimate as collateral damage too).
By misusing “climate change” so audaciously (and getting away with it), the UN ensured that an army of distracted or not-too-sharp supporters would adopt it, and it would reduce conversations about the role of man-made emissions down to a caricature. “Do you believe in climate change” — ask the thought police, it’s a loaded question that invites any sane person to say “Yes” — because who believes in climate-sameness?
The term “climate denier” springs from this sick well — as if, somewhere on the planet, in asylums or day care centers, there might be someone who denies we have a climate. Bystanders watching a debate at this nonsensical level don’t accidentally step into the dissenter camp — by default, they are “with the UN”.
The answer to stopping this is to turn the nonsense against those who issue it, and not fall for the tactic and join the perversion.
So when the journalists / pollsters inanely repeat the litany — there are lots of options.
“Do you believe in Climate Change”:
1. What are the alternatives? (I mean, does anyone believe in climate unchange?)
2. Do you mean “climate change” as used in the English language or climate change as the UN defines it. (I need to I know what you are really asking?)
3. Have you heard of an ice age?
So yes, I agree wholeheartedly with Roger Pielke, but we need to do more than just expect science journals to be scientific, we must demand that journalists and pollsters use English.
A system of government where the least capable to lead
are elected by the least capable of producing, and where
the members of society least likely to sustain themselves
or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for
by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of
producers.
Thanks to treeman today (and before that Brice, Rupert, and Speedy who said: Ineptocracy — See also “Swan Song”).
Merci. ‘Tis a gem. If it is not in the Oxford now, it will be…
It could be that an ineptocracy is the inevitable end point of democracy……
…..
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
Everyone takes the path of least resistance, and democracy sits balanced on a high peak above the rugged terrain of a hundred thousand years of tribal existence. No matter what direction that complacency takes, all roads lead to the valley of tyranny.
Bank of America Pledges $50 Billion to Combat Climate Change
The unholy alliance between bankers and government is on naked display.
It’s the black hole in the kitchen: huge, obvious, and silent. And boy does it suck. As Climate Depot points out, Bank of America got a $45 billion bailout from the government during the global financial crisis. Now it’s promising $50 billion to “address Climate Change”. How Green is your Bankster?
It’s a feeding frenzy:
The bank’s new initiative includes lending, equipment finance, capital markets and advisory activity and carbon finance, as well as advice and investment help.
Bank of America will focus on promoting energy efficiency; renewable energy, including wind, solar and hydropower; lower-carbon transportation like electric and hybrid vehicles; and water and waste treatment and disposal initiatives. [Capitalgr]
They already spend nearly $20bn on climate and did it four years ahead of schedule. So why not $5obn?
The company has spent $17.9 billion toward its initial pledge, including $8.4 billion for energy efficiency activities, including low-cost loans and grants for retrofitting low-income neighborhoods for energy efficiency. It spent $5 billon on renewable energy projects, including helping the San Jose Unified School District in California to run on solar energy. An additional $1 billion went to consumer financing of hybrid vehicles. [WSJ]
A billion here, a billion there, and soon they’ll be talking real money.
Marc Morano asks “is that more than Heartland spends?” / sarc
Well Marc, says Jo, don’t forget it is spread over 10 years. 😉 It’s only a thousand times the Heartland budget. Expect the guys at DeSmog to immediately set up a Bank-of-America-Secrets site to protest at the evil influence large corporates have over democracy. SourceWatch will graphically connect Bank of America to scientists, solar companies, wind investors, Green Foundations, donors to the Democrats and on and on into one spaghetti bunker of vested interests. We look forward to it.
Any day now, the innumerate chanters of the “Big-Oil Funded Deniers” cult will learn to count past 10, and realize that they’ve been the useful idiots for the Money Masters. And pigs will fly (collect their dividends and end-of-year bonuses).
In an extremely worrying development, we can add Nick Drapela’s name to the list of skeptics fired for the heresy of speaking out. This email from Gordon Fulks came around today, and I want to spread the message. I have written before about the scientist of upstanding integrity and action that is Art Robinson — When he ran for Congress, three of his children doing PhD’s were targeted at OSU. The details of Joshua, Bethany and Matthews work are described on the Oregon State Outrage blog. These exemplary students were close to finishing their work towards PhD degrees in nuclear engineering when all three suddenly faced major obstacles and the likelihood of losing all their work to date. (See the Outrage blog for updates).
But the outrageous behaviour continues. Legal action may not be the answer (In Robinson’s case the Uni apparently wants them to sue, so it will be obliged to have “no comment” while OSU would get taxpayer funds to extend the case at length.) What we need is facebook, twitter, letters and emails – a campaign to let the State of Oregon (and especially university donors) know their university has regressed to a feudal religious institute — Jo
—————————————————————————————————————–
Gordon Fulks writes:
Hello Everyone,
In theory at least Oregon State University (OSU) seems to be a bastion of academic freedom, diversity, and tolerance. A wide range of ideas are openly discussed. The most viable rise to the top and the least viable fade away. But it is all a fairy tale, because OSU operates under a politically correct regimen that dictates what is acceptable to say and what is not. Transgressors who dare to be different are eventually weeded out so that the campus maintains its ideological purity.
OSU is not yet as swift or efficient as the Soviet system when Joseph Stalin was trying to quash dissent among biologists who refused to go along with Trofim Lysenko. If warnings to compromise their integrity were not followed, Stalin simply had biologists shot. That quickly thinned the ranks of all biologists and persuaded the remaining ones to comply with Stalin’s wishes. Of course, it also destroyed Soviet biology, because Lysenko was pedaling nonsense. And Russian biology has never recovered.
We learned over the weekend that chemist Nickolas Drapela, PhD has been summarily fired from his position as a “Senior Instructor” in the Department of Chemistry. The department chairman Richard Carter told him that he was fired but would not provide any reason. Subsequent attempts to extract a reason from the OSU administration have been stonewalled. Drapela appears to have been highly competent and well-liked by his students. Some have even taken up the fight to have him reinstated.
What could possibly have provoked the OSU administration to take precipitous action against one of their academics who has been on their staff for ten years, just bought a house in Corvallis, and has four young children (one with severe medical problems)? Dr. Drapela is an outspoken critic of the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, the official religion of the State of Oregon, the Oregon Democratic Party, and Governor John Kitzhaber.
“Agenda 21″ sounds like a daft-but-harmless-idea you can ignore. I found it hard to get enthused, but I was wrong, and no one sums this up better than James Delingpole in “Watermelons” (aka “Killing the Earth to Save it). To paraphrase James’s brilliant work (forgive me James) from page 190:
Some of you still aren’t convinced that you need to worry about Agenda 21 because you are thinking:
a) Agenda 21 sounds way too much like Area 51, (you know Aliens and the Roswell incident). Nut job stuff.
b) It was signed in 1992. If it was that bad, we’d have heard by now. Surely?
c) What sovereign nation would be so insane as to sign itself up for a binding treaty?
James explains that it’s real, it’s important (like an anti-magna-carta), and its’ a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Governments could sign up because it was “voluntary”, but then those voluntary rules are scrupulously and doggedly enforced by the “labyrinthine, democratically unaccountable behemoth that is the United Nations.”
Furthermore, he points out that it’s not like they’ve bothered to hide their aims — they want to control your resources, your money, your actions and every decision you want to make:
“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”— excerpt from The UN, Agenda 21*
Agenda 21 is very much about property rights (ie. their right to your property). Justice Gilpin-Green quotes Agenda 21:
“Land…cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market,” Agenda 21 says. “Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes. The provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only be achieved if land is used in the interest of the society as a whole.”**
Agenda 21 is so non-threatening, voluntary, and out of date, that Alabama has just written legislation specifically designed to stop it. The legislation has passed. It protects property rights against anything linked to Agenda 21, and also stops the state sending or receiving money to Agenda 21 NGO’s or GONGO’s.
Who knew that Alabama needed legislation to stop private property from being confiscated without due process?
Agenda 21 also appears in other forms like, ICLEI, or the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives. Gilpin-Green says “When countries like the United States fail to adopt the environmentalist agenda promoted by the United Nations, that organization manages to bypass them by providing various incentives to state, county, and municipal organizations.” Apparently some towns get funding from the UN and display their cheques proudly. How does that work — taxpayers pay money to a government, which gives it to a foreign unelected body, which then pays their local council in order to gain influence? So much for your votes. When the chain of voting-to-power becomes so long and distant, it’s a case of your money, used against you.
The paper might have been scientifically invalid, but it was a box-office success.
The headlines were everywhere
“1000 years of climate data confirms Australia’s warming”said the press release from University of Melbourne. It was picked up by The Guardian: “Australasia has hottest 60 years in a millennium, scientists find”; The Age and The Australian led with “Warming since 1950 ‘unprecedented’. The story was on ABC 24 and ABC news where Gergis proclaimed:” there are no other warm periods in the last 1000 years that match the warming experienced in Australasia since 1950.” It was all over the ABC including ABC Radio National, and they were “95% certain“! On ABC AM, “the last five decades years in Australia have been the warmest. ” Plus there were pages in Science Alert,Campus DailyEco news, The Conversation, Real Climate* and Think Progress.
Blog review is where the real science gets tested
Skeptics have been looking through the paper, and three weeks after it was published a team at Climate Audit (kudos to Jean S and Nick Stokes) uncovered a problem so significant that the authors announced that this paper is “on hold”. It has been withdrawn from the American Meteorological Society website.Bishop Hill has probably the best summary of what this means, and how it unfolded.
When Steve McIntyre asked for the full data, she refused. Gergis has an activist past which she has recently tried to hide. She was proud to mention in her biography that her data has been requested from 16 nations: So requests from Tunisia, Cuba, and Brazil are OK; but Canada — not so much. Apparently she didn’t appreciate his expertise with statistics and told him to get the data himself from the original authors, and added ” This is commonly referred to as ‘research’. We will not be entertaining any further correspondence on the matter. “
Will any of these media outlets update their news?
On AM, David Karoly raved about how the study was strong because it relied more on observations not modeling (it is getting to them that skeptics keep pointing out they have no empirical evidence), and claimed he had “high confidence” in the results. (Is that the same kind of high confidence he has in future predictions of warming?)
MATTHEW CARNEY: Professor Karoly says the strength of the study is that it’s relied more on direct observations and measurements than climate modelling.
DAVID KAROLY: Nothing is absolutely certain in science but we say with very high confidence because we have repeated the analysis alone for the uncertainties that the warming in the last 50 years is very unusual and cannot, very likely cannot be explained by natural climate variability alone.
How concerned are they with accuracy? Are all these media outlets happy to leave their readers or viewers with the impression that these results are robust, reliable, and strong? In truth, even before this paper was withdrawn, before it was promoted, investigative reporters had plenty to wonder about.
Did any journalist really ask any hard questions to start with?
Let’s not bother to get into the point that the results of crunching the data 3000 different ways means their “confidence” came from models, not from the 27 proxies, most of which didn’t cover the full 1000 years, or the Australian mainland either.
The litany, the message went on and on and on in the media and apart from Adam Morton in The Age, most investigative journalists never thought to ask the question “How much warmer are we now than 1000 years ago” because if they had, Gergis would have had to say “by a tenth of a degree”. (That much eh?) Technically it was 0.09C.
The certainty of Australia being 0.09 of a degree cooler 1000 years ago comes down to observations from a batch of trees in Tasmania and New Zealand. (If we can calculate the regional temperature so accurately that way, why do we bother with a network of 100 thermometers? We could pop a max-min gauge next to those trees and “interpolate” the rest, No?)
This is one of the star case-studies of the noxious cost of big-government. A pernicious soul-destroying wrecker of livelihoods. This tyranny in action.
Matt and Janet are skeptics who ran a Beef Feedlot from Narrogin, Western Australia (2 hours SE of Perth). When they spoke out against climate change policies, onerous license changes were added that drove them to bankruptcy. Readers here and at Watts Up raised over $30,000 dollars as they faced eviction in Sept 2010. (It was the first time skeptics around the world had been asked to help a cause like this, and the response was so overwhelming that Paypal still can’t list all the donations we received on Sept 18th, 2010. It breaks their site).
The Thompsons write today with an update: they’ve decided it’s unfeasible to try to run their business under these conditions and with the new carbon tax in Australia, and due to family reasons they’ve reluctantly left Australia, moved back to the USA with their four children (bad for Australia, but good for Uncle Sam). They’ve reached a settlement with the bank but fully intend to pursue their legal case against the Department of Environment in West Australia. I’m delighted to say that Matt and Janet’s indomitable spirits survived these last two years, which pushed them to the brink and they are looking forward with great hope.
Their story in brief – a story I initially couldn’t believe would happen in Australia
This all sounds so unlikely: surely good honest businesses couldn’t go broke in a first world country because their owners spoke their minds? I’ve documented every statement below on this site. No one could run a business under these conditions.
Matt and Janet moved from Texas to Australia to set up a new feedlot farm. Their business was so successful in early 2007 they were turning away customers. After Matt spoke out as a climate skeptic at a greenhouse gas reporting meeting in May 2007 the DEC changed their farming license adding 33 new conditions, one or two which were so impossible, that no bank would loan against them. They had already signed contracts based on the previous license, and the newly reduced head-count drove them to the verge of bankruptcy. DEC even admits it broke it’s own rules. Apparently the Thompsons beef-feedlot didn’t smell right, even though Matt and Janet did everything the department suggested (and more), their closest neighbours wrote letters of support (wanting the farm to grow), 900 townfolk signed a petition for them, 6000 odour tests showed there was no problem, and wait for it, their farm was right next to a piggery which had run for 28 years. But 21 verified complaints from people who wanted to subdivide land and a number of other unchecked, not publicly listed, complaints about odours that can’t be measured were enough to close them down. And you thought Rule of Law applied in Australia? Not so, if you don’t butter up, pander, bow and obey the politically correct dictums set by unelected bureaucrats and the covert green-police, you too could be subject to random arbitrary license changes that insist your business must not offend anyone anywhere (and especially not your Green land-developing neighbours).
Donations for the Thompsons children helped to keep the family in their home for another 18 months, and put them in a much stronger position to fight the ongoing legal case. A large part went towards their move to the US, and the last part was sent a month or so ago to help set them up.
From Matt and Janet:
Dear Readers of WUWT and Jo Nova,
We would like to give an update to all of you who have supported us in a variety of ways, including with donations (in-kind and monetary) for our children, writing letters, and contacting politicians and our bank.
For a refresher on the background to our story, please see the original YouTube we produced, including the important second one, Part 1Part 2: [And/or Anthony and Jo, whatever links to your own blogs on this issue]
We returned to the USA for Christmas in 2011 on frequent flyer tickets given to us by family. Matt’s dad had been having health problems, and had had a major surgery in July. After seeing our parents again, we were moved to reconsider our living situation; namely the fact that since our business was not operating, we could no longer afford to fly our family back to the States should something sudden arise. (Matt’s dad had another surgery in February, and we were thankful to be here for that.)
In addition to the desire to be within driving proximity to our families, we had become acutely concerned over the deterioration in political, legislative and regulatory circumstances in Australia. We worried that even if we were to win our case against the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) (a case that is still in progress), the passage of the Carbon (sic) Tax in 2010 made the possibility of ever operating our feedlot again impossible. It meant that even if we won in court, most of our efforts to profitably operate our business would have gone towards convincing some bureaucrat that we weren’t causing greenhouse gas emissions, when in fact we were. Productive people do.
Global Carbon Market trading climbed to $176 billion in 2011 according to the The World Bank, which has just released it’s annual State and Trends of The Carbon Market in 2012.That makes it about the same value as total global wheat production — which supplies about 20% of the calories consumed by the 7 billion people on planet Earth.
The global carbon market disguises itself as an angel against the greedy corporates. Yet it is, itself, a giant corporate playing field. The mainstream media remains largely silent on the “vested interests” represented by this major industry that did not even exist 10 years ago.
Global Carbon Markets are worth billions
Was 2011 the peak of global carbon trading? Looks all downhill from here.
A record number of emissions products were traded in 2011, even though prices of EU carbon permits and international offsets fells well below $10 a tonne late in the year. The prices have fallen, but the volumes have increased. Look out, the average price in 2011 was $18.80US, but the prices in 2012 are less than half that. It will take a monster increase in volumes in 2012 to keep raising the total market value.
The Global Carbon Market was still growing in 2011, but not exponentially like it was from 2005 – 2009. The bad news (for carbon traders) is about to hit the fan in the next report in 2013. There is a hint of it in the page announcing the report: “the market for primary CDM has dropped to its lowest level since 2004.”
Global means “EU”
The EU is 80% of the total market. Everywhere else is piddlingly small:
The rise in volume lifted the value of the EU market to $148 billion from a revised $134 billion in 2010, even though average EU carbon prices fell 4 percent year on year to $18.80 a tonne.
But front-year EU carbon prices are averaging under $10 a tonne so far this year as the bloc’s sluggish economy dampens demand for carbon permits in a market that analysts say has accumul1ated a surplus near the equivalent of 1 billion tonnes.
Other national and regional carbon schemes showed mixed results. New Zealand’s carbon market value tripled to $351 million, while the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in North America nearly halved to $249 million, the bank said.
Primary project-based transactions in the voluntary offset market were valued at $569 million in 2011, up 37 percent, the bank said. ($1 = 0.7977 euros)
Remember that someone somewhere is paying this money that is poured into a trading scheme we don’t need to solve a problem for which there is no supporting evidence. The voluntary market is one three hundredth of the total. Without forced legislation this market would vanish. (Let the people vote, eh?). This is $176 billion of economic activity wasted, mostly in the economic disaster zone that is the EU. People are rioting in the streets. That’s blood, sweat and tears to build things and do things the people on this planet would not choose to do if they were not forced to.
Excellent video. This man is good. The message is spot on.
This is an edgy fast paced narrative about why we owe the most to some of the most unpopular people in history. It’s about free speech: why it matters, why we may lose it. About the threat that Finkelstein poses.
“It’s about arrogance, it’s about powerful people here in Australia who believe that they are smarter than you, that their opinion is worth more than your opinion, and that their thinking is better than your thinking, and if you think they’re wrong, you should just shut up.”
There have been nutters in history who were reviled, derided, hated, and spat on. A few of these held the answers that saved countless lives — including quite possibly, yours and mine.
Paul Homewood follows the money to find Royal Society funding.
(Figures are rounded)
…
Even if we acknowledge that most of the money goes straight to research, there is a slab of money that goes straight to the Society:
So government funding (Parliamentary Grant in Aid) amounts to 67% of total income. Similar amounts have been fixed for a 5 year period to allow the Society to plan ahead properly. It is also worth noting the income generated from commercial activities, such as investment income and publications.
Government money is channelled through the Dept of Business, who insist that it is allocated to specific projects and programmes. Most of this is therefore paid out by the Royal Society in the form of research grants etc. However in 2010/11 £2,265,000 was allocated to “Support and Central Expenses”, in other words overheads costs.
Reader Mike passed me a note that Canberra/ ACT residents may be interested in. The Climate Sceptics party has changed its name to the No Carbon Tax Climate Sceptics and is working to establish a branch for the ACT elections. The party needs another 70 members by June 30th, so it can register in time for the ACT Election in October. Perhaps you know someone who can help out?
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That meant the ANAO could avoid an audit, since the BOM had changed data-sets, the point of auditing the old set was moot.
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