Despite all the headlines we see, 2011 in Australia was remarkable for its extraordinary averageness. It is a rare year that is more average than 2011 was.
(This email was spotted on it’s way to various government officials. — Jo)
———————————————
Guest post from Steve Woodman
2011 was the 52nd coldest year on record in Australia, colder than 1912, 1914, 1915 & 1919
Alarmist propaganda outlets such as the ABC were clearly disappointed by 2011 and were forced to resort to decadal temperatures rather than individual years to provide it with its headlines 1:
“Last decade equals warmest on record: UN”
The article then goes on to say:
“2011 ranks as the 10th warmest year since 1850, when accurate measurements began”
That may be so in a global sense, but if the ABC took a more local perspective, in Australia, 2011 was below the 1961-1990 average (see the graph below) 2.
A new brief summary of the reasoning and evidence behind the skeptics case. –Jo
———————————————
The Skeptic’s Case
Who Are You Going To Believe – The Government Climate Scientists Or The Data?
Guest Post Dr David M.W. Evans
We check the main predictions of the climate models against the best and latest data. Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong. Why? Every serious skeptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years, yet most people have never heard the message — here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention.
What the Government Climate Scientists Say
Figure 1: The climate models. If the CO2 level doubles (as it is on course to do by about 2070 to 2100), the climate models estimate the temperature increase due to that extra CO2 will be about 1.1°C × 3 = 3.3°C. [1]
The direct effect of CO2 is well-established physics, based on laboratory results, and known for over a century.[2]
Feedbacks are due to the ways the Earth reacts to the direct warming effect of the CO2. The threefold amplification by feedbacks is based on the assumption, or guess, made around 1980, that more warming due to CO2 will cause more evaporation from the oceans and that this extra water vapor will in turn lead to even more heat trapping because water vapor is the main greenhouse gas. And extra heat will cause even more evaporation, and so on. This amplification is built into all the climate models.[3] The amount of amplification is estimated by assuming that nearly all the industrial-age warming is due to our CO2.
The government climate scientists and the media often tell us about the direct effect of the CO2, but rarely admit that two thirds of their projected temperature increases are due to amplification by feedbacks. They admit there are discrepancies, and go to great lengths to resolve them (see for example, Thorne, Dessler, Sherwood).
Oil on Canvas George Crie (cropped). "Panic Attack or Anxiety PTSD" Neosurrealismart.com.
I just love some of these terms. Verity Jones (Diggingintheclay) and E. Michael Smith (Chiefio, see the postscript) are rolling on a neologistic wave, and they’re generating something special. The comments thread on Diggingintheclay is quite abuzz (and this comes from both that and Chiefio’s thread).
Adjixtered: Adjusted without adequate or meaningful explanation
Cliflation: The tendency for anything climate related to be inflated in importance, size, warming tendency, etc. (I think the pronounciation doesn’t capture the “climate” origin, hence I suggest “Climaflation” — as in “The clown fish research has been Climaflated.”)
Empixelated: To uncritically believe anything presented to you by the pixels on your screen. “Jones was sure Mann would be empixelated by the latest runs of HADcrut”. (I think this needs a different example: The Department of Climate Change produced brochureware websites designed to empixililate unsuspecting taxpayers.) (H/t Another Ian for the word “empixilated”)
Envirallax (noun) – the apparent shift in importance of a report, quotation or publication related to climate science due to the difference in belief or opinion on the causes of climate change between two readers (cf. parallax). Related terms – biased interpretation, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance.). Alternate definition: That peculiar tendency to see things shifted through an environmental filter just out of kilter. Political parallax. (I like it. Methinks this word will stick, credit to Verity Jones.)
Farigle (verb): To inexplicably adjust data that is far enough away that nobody will notice, or, alternately, to alter data originating in a place distant from a research facility and difficult to verify, especially after the passage of time.“After farigling the Arctic Data, trends were warmer.” (ht Verity for the word, Judy F for the second definition).
Googlehuffing: To manipulate search engines so as to rank an article (especially one about climate) extra high for political / monetary purposes. “AlGore asked the programmer to googlehuff his latest book”. A non-standard usage is to down rate articles by skeptics or with a skeptical point of view. “Algore demanded WUWT be googlehuffed into the 20th page”. (credit Chiefio).
Panixilation: (Br. Sp. Panicselation) That peculiar tendency to turn anything into a Panic Attack, especially with some exhilaration about it. Often seen in the Warmers World. “Hansen was clearly panixilated about the coal trains”. (h/t Chiefio for this excellent word).
Wikimentia: A kind of dementia commonly seen in wiki articles reflecting bias in the various sorts of delving into too much detail, not enough detail, making up detail, deleting inconvenient facts, and generally being politically driven to excess.
Doomian (Doomsian): The world view that says anything we do can only lead to doom. Related to panixilation, but more operative in that an actual outcome of doom is predicted. Doomers is a related noun form. “The doomian result was clearly sea level rise of 1000 meters and the loss of all islands in the Pacific.” Or even “Jones, a clear doomer, looked at the printout, panixilated, and said ‘The end is near!’; yet Smith just thought him doomian.” j ferguson suggests “the Apocolypsters” and “Catastophers“. (The French came up with that already: catastropher vt. to devastate). Catastrophobes could study Catastrophology?
Gillard once lauded the genius of the carbon market. That part of the “free” market which is free to move, is moving — and right out. The smart money is saying that carbon trading is a dead dog. It’s a has-been-tulip, a sick puppy, a sinking ship.
The future of global carbon trading is so “certain” that Barclays Bank is not even bothering to leave one part time guy in the US office with a post box, so they can pretend they still have an interest in it. The mood has so changed, they see an advantage in letting the world know they’re not wasting a single cent more on carbon trading in the United States of America. Well that made my day. :-).
“That is not good news for carbon-dioxide trading, especially not in the US,”
Barclays was the first UK bank to set up a carbon trading desk, and fast to move into carbon trading: “Barclays Capital is the most active player in the emissions trading market, having traded some 300 million tonnes as at February 2007″.
They control our money, our armed forces, our tax inspectors, jails, and police. Against that, we the people wield our biggest weapon — information.
The biggest threat to people in positions of power is the flow of news and ideas. The internet is the largest menace, the most powerful tool of the people, so we always knew the pushback was coming. Those who control the net, control the ability of the people to organize en masse, and to judge who is being honest, and who can be trusted. The Internet was vital in publicizing the climate data that contradicts the government climate scientists, because the mainstream media sure didn’t do it.
If SOPA PIPA is stopped (as it appears it might have been, as 6 supporters pull out) the only thing we can be sure of is that there will be other attempts to stop us speaking freely. This is an unending battle.
How bad is SOPA PIPA?
On closer inspection, the legalese in the bill has the potential to eviscerate free speech….and like NDAA, without proof…only with suspicion of “wrong-doing”. It’s all about copyright infringement. If you tick off the powers that be, and you’ve quoted someone, somewhere, saying something, you may have infringed on their copyright. As a defendant, you are not even present at the legal proceeding allowing “them” to shut you down until you prove yourself innocent.
How do they shut you down? Search engines are required to remove you from their listings. Internet Service Providers can be ordered to block access to your site. Advertising networks and payment providers can also be forced to cease doing business with you. This continues until you are proven INNOCENT. Wait – I thought it was innocent until proven guilty….oh….that was “before” the NDAA.
SOPA and PIPA are proposed government regulations that go far beyond protection of IP.
The regulations in the act are clearly designed to be abused by the government to censor parts of the internet and require organizations such as Facebook and Google to become content policemen.
There are better ways to solve the piracy problem:
It’s easy to stop movie piracy, put all the movies online for a reasonable fee (say $3 to watch). Apple’s iTunes has mostly supplanted illegal music downloading by offering most of the worlds songs for $1+. — Matthew Lock
(Useful discussion on itunes and piracy here and here.)
Where will the demands end?
The establishment will keep asking for more until something stops it… and what stops it growing? Nothing except us. It grows until the protests become too strong. We must not only protest just to keep what is ours (our freedom) but we must teach our children that protesting unwanted laws is a fact of life.
It’s just as with the laws of physics: a body in space will move until a force opposes it, children will ask for more until they test the limits, and governments will grow until something stops them.
Protests work. More people are checking Wikipedia during the blackout, and the only pages they can see are SOPA PIPA ones. Better to protest loud and strong now than wait til our freedom to speak is reduced.
History repeats — Rulers opposed information flows
The LA Times laments the loss of the totalitarian educational view — pity the poor students subjected to hearing both sides of the story:
Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change. Tennessee and Oklahoma also have introduced legislation to give climate change skeptics a place in the classroom.
In May, a school board in Los Alamitos, Calif., passed a measure, later rescinded, identifying climate science as a controversial topic that required special instructional oversight.
The news itself is interesting, but sadly viewed through the usual green-colored glasses.
Is it “reporting” or a propaganda piece? Let’s check the three boxes:
Box 1: One half of the story is reduced to Orwellian nonsense. Tick yes! — who, exactly, teaches children to deny we have a climate? Johnny, there are no clouds… Which state passes resolutions declaring that the climate does not change? Henceforth California will be 78…
Box 2: Look for the Mandatory Ritual Pean:“scientific evidence increasingly shows that fossil fuel consumption has caused the climate to change rapidly”. Tick two! Ritual complete. Notice that daring sweeping conclusion, of course, is backed by pffft-puffery-nothin’. (Yes we believe that driving causes droughts, and heaters cause hurricanes. Storms are coming, switch off your air-con to save the world!)
Box Three: Find spurious tenuous associations of one view of climate change to a/ Tobacco-propaganda, b/ creationism or c/ Big-oil-profits. Tick b and c. Yessity yes. (How did they manage to leave out the tobacco slur?)
Despite the propaganda, the news is good news. The people are not fooled.
“Any time we have a meeting of 100 teachers, if you ask whether they’re running into pushback on teaching climate change, 50 will raise their hands,” said Frank Niepold, climate education coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who meets with hundreds of teachers annually. “We ask questions about how sizable it is, and they tell us it is [sizable] and pretty persistent, from many places: your administration, parents, students, even your own family.”
You’ve gotta love it.
But look out for the “New national science standards for grades K-12 (which) are due in December.” Since they are based on standards from the National Academy of Sorcery, we know logic, reason and evidence will need all the help they can get.
Ron Paul is painted as fringe by the Establishment. (If you’re not part of the establishment then you must be “fringe”, right?).
Ten years ago Ron Paul made long series of detailed economic and foreign policy predictions that he hoped he would be proven wrong on. It was a year before the US started action in Iraq. Five years before the housing bubble busted. Six years before the Global Financial Crisis. Nine years before the Arab Spring. (At least he was wrong on the US “draft”. So far).
How many mainstream politicians can point to a speech like this? How many presidential candidates saw it coming?
“Let it not he said that no one cared,
that no one objected once its realized that our liberties and wealth are in jeopardy”
Ron Paul
Ron Paul 2002 April 24th.
There’s a copy of the video of the speech without newspaper overlays, and background music, for those who prefer the uncluttered view.
“He saw these things coming because he reveres liberty above all else and when you cherish liberty you can see the things that threaten it. “John Carey
I have transcribed parts, but not all of his rapid fire delivery of specific point after point. The video above shows recent headlines to match the predictions as he made them. (The full transcript is here.)
This is a post for those who like the intellectual stimulation of unraveling the cause and effect links at the bleeding edge. It’s a weekend puzzle.
Frank Lansner (of Hidethedecline) wants to toss out his latest thoughts and findings for discussion. With a very simple equation he’s managed to recreate a curve just like Hadcrut temperature profile, using just the Nino 3.4 data (see Fig. 1). If it stands up, this would imply the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) pretty much determined a significant part of the climate — which is not a shock, but nonetheless there’s not a lot of room for CO2. The turning points do seem to match well (unlike the temperature versus CO2 “turning points”). As William Kininmonth reminded us, the oceans cover 70% of the planet, and are 4km deep, and most of that water is very very cold, even under the equator. If the surface of the central pacific cools by 1 degree does that drop global temperatures by 0.1C?
Of course, the mystery of what drives the PDO still stands. On that score, Frank looks at Siberia and Alaska, and finds an interesting correlation with the Nino3.4 when it is lagged by 15 -18 months. He’s chosen four zones in the Pacific and is looking for repeated sequences.
As I said, this is all speculation, but kind of like a climate crossword, only no one has the solution yet. It’s heavy stuff, but I know some people will enjoy the challenge of testing Frank’s ideas. The Dane and his insatiable curiosity.
Fig1. The SST of the Nino3,4 area (5S-5N / 120-170W) in the Pacific Ocean seems to hold information on how global temperatures evolve, at least since 1920 where the first somewhat reliable SST data from the Nino3,4 area begins.
The SST of the Nino3,4 area (5S-5N / 120-170W) in the Pacific Ocean might hold information on how global temperatures evolve, at least since 1920 where the first somewhat reliable SST data from the Nino3,4 area begins. For each month a constant fraction of the Nina3,4 index is added to global temperatures from the month before, and this approach seems to re-produce global temperatures rather well. The 1000 $ question is if this relationship will remain tomorrow ?
The relation on fig 1 – if true – has the following consequence:
La Niña: One year of average -1 K in the nino3,4 area changes global temperatures approx – 0,094 K El Niño: One year of average +1 K in the nino3,4 area changes global temperatures approx + 0,105 K
Due to the above finding I carried out just a rough analysis of the climatic patterns in the Pacific Ocean. There are different writings on the subject, but I like hands on myself so I can investigate exactly what I find relevant. I have divided up the Pacific into the three zones, along with the well known Nino3.4 area.
Nir Shaviv, the well known astrophysicist from Israel, points out that climate sensitivity (according to the IPCC and co) has barely changed in 33 years. Therefore their predictions from the FAR (IPCC, First Assessment Report) in 1990 ought to mean something. Yet observations are now tracking outside and below even their lowest bounds of estimates. When will the IPCC admit those models need to change?
–Jo
————————————————–
On IPCCs exaggerated climate sensitivity and the emperor’s new clothes
A few days ago I had a very pleasant meeting with Andrew Bolt. He was visiting Israel and we met for an hour in my office. During the discussion, I mentioned that the writers of the recent IPCC reports are not very scientific in their conduct and realized that I should write about it here.
Normal science progresses through the collection of observations (or measurements), the conjecture of hypotheses, the making of predictions, and then through the usage of new observations, the modification of the hypotheses accordingly (either ruling them out, or improving them). In the global warming “science”, this is not the case.
What do I mean?
From the first IPCC report until the previous IPCC report, climate predictions for future temperature increase where based on a climate sensitivity of 1.5 to 4.5°C per CO2 doubling. This range, in fact, goes back to the 1979 Charney report published by the National Academy of Sciences. That is, after 33 years of climate research and many billions of dollars of research, the possible range of climate sensitivities is virtually the same! In the last (AR4) IPCC report the range was actually slightly narrowed down to 2 to 4.5°C increase per CO2 doubling (without any good reason if you ask me). In any case, this increase of the lower limit will only aggravate the point I make below, which is as follows.
Because the possible range of sensitivities has been virtually the same, it means that the predictions made in the first IPCC report in 1990 should still be valid. That is, according to the writers of all the IPCC reports, the temperature today should be within the range of predictions made 22 years ago. But they are not!
The business as usual predictions made in 1990, in the first IPCC report, are given in the following figure.
The business-as-usual predictions made in the first IPCC report, in 1990. Since the best range for the climate sensitivity (according to the alarmists) has not changed, the global temperature 22 years later should be within the predicted range. From this graph, we take the predicted slopes around the year 2000.
How well do these predictions agree with reality? In the next figure I plot the actual global and oceanic temperatures (as made by the NCDC). One can argue that either the ocean temperature or the global (ocean+land) temperature is better. The Ocean temperature includes smaller fluctuations than the land (and therefore less than the global temperature as well), however, if there is a change in the average global state, it should take longer for the oceans to react. On the other hand, the land temperature (and therefore the global temperature) is likely to include the urban heat island effect.
The NCDC ocean (blue) and global (brown) monthly temperature anomalies (relative to the 1900-2000 average temperatures) since 1980. The observed temperatures compared to the predictions made in the first IPCC report. Note that the width of the predictions is ±0.1°C, which is roughly the size of the month to month fluctuations in the temperature anomalies.
Years before Climategate, THAT email, from Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes told us everything we needed to know about the scientific standards at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia. THAT email was the tip of the iceberg, and below is what lay underneath the surface — the things that were said behind the scenes at the time. Geoff Sherrington has pieced together a sequence of climategate emails, his own emails, and parts of Warwick Hughes work to recreate the sequence.
And for the true skeptic-aficionados, here’s a new layer of history to the skeptical chronology. Where did this volunteer audit movement begin?
Who would have guessed that at least one skeptic, Hughes, was asking for the data Phil Jones worked with, as long ago as 1991? (That was way back in the days where people worked with hard copy print outs, and drew graphs by hand!) Does Hughes rank as volunteer Skeptic Number 1?
UPDATE: I asked Warwick, and he thinks the first unpaid skeptic was Fred Wood in 1988*. — Jo
——————————————————————————
Guest post by: Geoffrey H Sherrington, Scientist.
This is the longer story behind one of the more anti-science quotes in the short history of people attempting to be ‘climate scientists’, definition unclear. The pivotal short quote is in the opening email.
“Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”
…
Here is a series of emails and articles with my interspersed comments in italics. Each email number is the one assigned in Climategate One and Two, presumably by the donor named FOIA. The Climategate emails are indented below, so the source can be picked up easily. There are sections cut from other emails as well. They are not indented. We start with the famous email, the one that some say was the start of the difficulty that scientists in general found when they tried to access data from some climate scientists.
———————-
From Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes.
1299. Between July 2004 and Feb 2005. (Exact date not on my copy of the email.)
I should warn you that some data we have we are not supposed top (sic) pass on to others. We can pass on the gridded data – which we do. Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. There is IPR to consider. You can get similar data from GHCN at NCDC. Australia isn’t restricted there.
ACRONYMS
WMO = World Meteorological Organisation.
IPR = Intellectual Property Rights.
GHCN = Global Historical Climatology Network.
NCAR = USA National Centre for Atmospheric Research.
WWR = World Weather Records of the World Meteorological Organization.
MCDR = WMO’s Monthly Climatic Data for the World.
Phil had had some prior thoughts about this.
0688. 16 July 2004.
The reason for emailing though is that I’m also being hassled by Warwick Hughes for the CRU station dataset. We put up the gridded fields, but not the station data. Over the last year or so, I’ve told people they can’t have the station data – go to the GHCN site and get it. I knew that avenue has been closed, but it got some of them off my back. I’m not that inclined to release it to Hughes (who Mike knows and maybe Tom). All he wants to do is to show how I’ve made some mistake or used some incorrect data for some stations.
There are a number of issues, though:
Until recently we had very little data about real time changes in ocean pH around the world. Finally autonomous sensors placed in a variety of ecosystems “from tropical to polar, open-ocean to coastal, kelp forest to coral reef” give us the information we needed.
It turns out that far from being a stable pH, spots all over the world are constantly changing. One spot in the ocean varied by an astonishing 1.4 pH units regularly. All our human emissions are projected by models to change the world’s oceans by about 0.3 pH units over the next 90 years, and that’s referred to as “catastrophic”, yet we now know that fish and some calcifying critters adapt naturally to changes far larger than that every year, sometimes in just a month, and in extreme cases, in just a day.
Data was collected by 15 individual SeaFET sensors in seven types of marine habitats. Four sites were fairly stable (1, which includes the open ocean, and also sites 2,3,4) but most of the rest were highly variable (esp site 15 near Italy and 14 near Mexico) . On a monthly scale the pH varies by 0.024 to 1.430 pH units.
Figure 1. Map of pH sensor (SeaFET) deployment locations.
The authors draw two conclusions: (1) most non-open ocean sites vary a lot, and (2) and some spots vary so much they reach the “extreme” pH’s forecast for the doomsday future scenarios on a daily (a daily!) basis.
At Puerto Morelos (in Mexico’s easternmost state, on the Yucatán Peninsula) the pH varied as much as 0.3 units per hour due to groundwater springs. Each day the pH bottomed at about 10am, and peaked shortly after sunset. These extreme sites tell us that some marine life can cope with larger, faster swings than the apocalyptic predictions suggest, though of course, no one is suggesting that the entire global ocean would be happy with similar extreme swings.
Even the more stable and vast open ocean is not a fixed pH all year round. Hofmann writes that “Open-water areas (in the Southern Ocean) experience a strong seasonal shift in seawater pH (~0.3–0.5 units) between austral summer and winter.”
This paper is such a game changer, they talk about rewriting the null hypothesis:
“This natural variability has prompted the suggestion that “an appropriate null hypothesis may be, until evidence is obtained to the contrary, that major biogeochemical processes in the oceans other than calcification will not be fundamentally different under future higher CO2/lower pH conditions””
It’s another mindless record used to remind the public to “keep the faith” and recite the litany:
“Adelaide had it’s hottest start to the year since 1900” Sky news
Picking three particular days outof 365 and comparing them over a century is about as cherry-pickingly meaningless as it gets. But Ian Hill went back through the records to find that not only have there been 79 heatwaves in Adelaide since 1887, but there have been 51 heat-waves that were hotter since 1887.
Ian Hill crunched the numbers and wrote:
Using the definition of a heatwave being “three or more consecutive days at or above 38C”, for no other reason than the fact that this fits in nicely with Adelaide’s recent maxima of 38.0, 41.6 and 40.6 on Dec 31, Jan 1 and Jan 2 respectively, I found that there have been 79 such heatwaves recorded in Adelaide since Jan 21, 1887, the date of the first such information available from the BOM. The recent heatwave is ranked 52nd, where the average maximum of days involved is used to rank heatwaves of the same duration.
If the file is sorted in chronological order a familiar trend emerges where there are many years on end with no heatwaves, then clusters of them. Between 1973 and 1989 there was only one, a week-long heatwave in January 1982. The longest heatwave was in March 2008 where there were 12 consecutive days above 38 degrees C. In fact the day before was 37.9 and the previous two days to that were above 35, so it was reported as a 15-day heatwave. This would be the true “record” for many sites in SE Australia and for Adelaide it was called “a once in 3000 years occurrence”.
Probably the most severe heatwaves were in January 1908 where the Adelaide citizens endured a week of temperatures averaging 43.2. Earlier in the month they had six days averaging 41.8.
UPDATE 2014: Claims made that “Michael Mann Faces Bankruptcy as his Courtroom Climate Capers Collapse” on Feb 22, are incorrect. See here for more information. This post below is two years old, and many things have changed. — Jo
It’s slipped past most skeptics with all the action lately, but John O’Sullivan is putting in above and beyond what any single skeptical soul ought to.
He’s already been a key figure helping Tim Ball in the legal fight with the UVA establishment, which has spent over a million dollars helping Michael Mann to hide emails. The case was launched by Michael Mann, but could turn out to do a huge favor to skeptics — the discovery process is a powerful tool, and we all know who has been hiding their methods, their data, and their work-related correspondence.
Tim Ball and John O’Sullivan are helping all the free citizens of the West. The burden should not be theirs alone. There are many claims for help at the moment, but that is a sign that the grand scam is coming to a head.
— Jo
————————————————————————————
Official: I Just Bet My House on the Outcome of Science Trial of the Century
No truer headline will you read. Last month this author literally wagered his home, life savings, and all his possessions on the outcome of a crucial global warming lawsuit currently ongoing in Canada.
So what is it that drove me to such apparent recklessness endangering not only my own well-being but that of my family? Well, to me this pivotal lawsuit encapsulates the archetypal ‘good versus evil’ battle no conscientious parent can ignore.
Dr. Ball famously declared that his adversary belongs “in the state pen, not Penn State.” For that Ball was summarily hit with a libel suit and Ball’s legal fees could exceed $300,000. But defiantly, the septuagenarian says, “if you think education is expensive – try ignorance.”
So persuasive is the evidence to me that last night I signed a contract in favor of Dr. Ball to forsake my worldly goods in the event the B.C. court ruled in favor of his adversary, Dr. Michael Mann .
I met two Australian libertarians a few weeks ago who didn’t know who Ron Paul was, but then, why would they? The media sure doesn’t want anyone to talk about Paul.
In the Iowa Polls Romney is the “front-runner”, the “man-to-beat”, and leads at (wow) 24%, while Paul is completely out of contention, hardly worth a mention, at… ah… 22%. If Romney wins, it will set him up for the run at the White house, if Ron Paul wins, it “it may jeopardize the future importance of Iowa in the presidential election cycle“. Follow the logic: if Paul is elected in Iowa, then “Paul is just unelectable.” They actually say that. (Some polls put the two men level.)
If there was a serious frontrunner in the US republican race who was smart, decent, a doctor with no scandals, a long record of keeping promises in congress, a magnetic ability to raise money, massive grassroots fan base, and excellent polling, well of course the media will ignore him. Censorship by omission is weapon number one (and we know all about that as climate skeptics). If they have to mention him (and it’s coming to that), look for the opinion that writes him off: “No one seriously thinks Paul can win”. (It doesn’t even need to be an attributed quote). It’s weapon number two. Starting now is weapon three: stringing dirt out of newsletters that are 20 years old. They’ll call him extreme, fringe, a radical, but what he wants most is to stick with the US constitution and the words of the founding fathers. He wants freedom for the people, peace, and the government to get out of the way. Get ready for the smear campaign from the people who want the opposite.
The parallels with how the Establishment (the governments and mainstream media) treat climate skepticism are obvious. They ignored skeptics until 2008, omitting any mention of us or our arguments. Then we started doing well in public polling, and they switched to ridicule. (Remember the famous quote mistakenly thought to be Ghandi?* First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight, then you win.) Declaring that “all scientists say x” is so like “no one seriously thinks Paul can win”.
Notice that, like us, Paul gets his message out via the Internet because the mainstream media is denied to his ideas. There is an historical precedent for this phenomenon: the church once had a monopoly on distributing high quality information, via the pulpit. Then the printing press came along, bypassing the Church, and we got the reformation and the enlightenment (and also a profound shake up in the power structure, leading to a series of wars including the 30 Year War, but that’s a story for another time). The powers that be currently own our political class and our mainstream media, but the Internet is increasingly bypassing their controls on what people can know and think. (Something like this paragraph, for instance, will probably never appear anywhere in the mainstream media.) Paul threatens both the military power (he wants the US to stop being the world policeman, to bring its forces home) and the money power (he wants to stop money manufacture out of thin air and abolish the Fed), and for good measure he even threatens the power of large criminal organizations (he wants to legalize drugs).
I have no business telling US voters how to vote. But I’m a member of Western Civilization too. The rest of the West needs a strong US to help us defend our freedoms. We need free speech. We need politicians with principle and people who can clean up the corruption.
There are points I don’t agree with him on, but I so admire the man who sticks to his word, who speaks his mind, who can’t be bought.
The media are staffed by people known to vote left. They want Mitt Romney or even Newt Gingrich (just like they want Malcolm Turnbull in Australia). That’s exactly why the Republicans should pick… someone, anyone else. Whoever the media want in this race, they don’t have the interests of (non-establishment) Republicans at heart.
If National Geographic had more stories like this one, I’d be inclined to subscribe. This is fascinating stuff.
Seven thousand years before Stonehenge was Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, where you’ll find ring upon ring of T-shaped stone towers arranged in a circle. Around 11,600 years ago hundreds of people gathered on this mound, year after year, possibly for centuries.
There are plenty of mysteries on this hill. Some of the rocks weigh 16 tons, but archaeologists can find no homes, no hearths, no water source, and no sign of a town or village to support the hundreds of workers who built the rings of towers. The people apparently, unthinkably really, were nomadic, as far as we know, they had no wheels, and no beasts of burden. True hunter gatherers, whose first heavy building project was not a home to fend off the elements, but a religious sacred site.
Perhaps we should not be so surprised, after all, we know the pyramids, the largest and oldest surviving buildings didn’t house people or grain either — the only humans they keep warm were dead ones. In a sense, the theme repeats. It takes extraordinary expertise and effort to move tons of rock, especially if you don’t have a trolley, let alone a crane, yet seemingly the first priority for our ancestors was not food or shelter, but just some respite from daily overbearing fears. Could it be some other reason than fear like the “spectacle” or festival (mentioned in the article) or the ever reliable search for status? Maybe, but it’s hard to believe these circles could be about power trips or parties if the there is no permanent settlement to reward the hierarchy.
Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier [than Stonehenge] and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.
“Within minutes of getting there,” Schmidt says, he realized that he was looking at a place where scores or even hundreds of people had worked in millennia past. The limestone slabs were not Byzantine graves but something much older.
Inches below the surface the team struck an elaborately fashioned stone. Then another, and another—a ring of standing pillars. As the months and years went by, Schmidt’s team, a shifting crew of German and Turkish graduate students and 50 or more local villagers, found a second circle of stones, then a third, and then more. Geomagnetic surveys in 2003 revealed at least 20 rings piled together, higgledy-piggledy, under the earth.
Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first. Sometimes, later, they installed a third. Then the whole assemblage would be filled in with debris, and an entirely new circle created nearby. The site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.
What makes a leader of a field, a leader? They have a brain, and not always, but sometimes, they can reason. So it’s not surprising that some leaders see through the fog. Here’s another example of how the truth gets out. It’s a specialist field, and newspaper stories are all doom and gloom (eg. Climate change threat to Australia’s top wines! ) but one of its most esteemed leaders is saying emphatically: not so.
“The effects of climate change have been dramatically over-estimated. Future global climate change caused by human activity will be much less than feared and be largely benign for viticulture”. “The 21st Century will be wine’s golden age”.
In viticulture, tiny changes in levels of part-per-trillion molecules produce prizewinners (or not). See Croser’s review to appreciate just how much. They don’t just talk in degrees but the number of days involved.
“…the quantum and quality of the tertiary aroma and flavour compounds synthesised is profoundly influenced by atmospheric temperature. John Gladstones identifies the optimal mean temperature of the last 30 days of ripening for the synthesis of flavour and pigment in red varieties as 18-22ºC and for the best attributes of delicate white and sparkling wines the mean can be as low as 12-15ºC”
Here is one of their own greats staking his reputation on the skeptical side. About a third of the book is about climate change, and John Gladstones writes prize winning books of almost biblical fame in the vineyard industry. According to one winery blogger, Gladstones’ 1992 book — the highly acclaimed Viticulture and Environment –became THE essential resource book, above almost all others. Gladstones is a leading agricultural scientist, winning prizes for his work on breeding, agronomy, and botany. The famous Margaret River wine growing region (here in WA) was set up because Gladstones recommended it.
His new book Wine, Terroir and Climate Change (Wakefield Press) is garnering excellent reviews, and here’s the thing: his message on climate change is well researched, clear, and unapologetic — man-made effects have been exaggerated, and the effects of extra CO2 are largely beneficial. He’s 79, and not going to waste time pandering to silly fashions.
Australian people know they are being “sold” a message in the media. According to the Australian Election Study from 2010, just 17% are “confident” in The Press. [Story: The Australian]
Australians were underwhelmed with the politics on offer in 2010, Rudd hit deep lows, Gillard had knifed Rudd, yet, even in that unflattering environment over twice as many people (43%) said they were confident in “the federal government ” as said the same about the media. I wonder what these results would be now?
Trust in the media is a theme I will keep returning to in 2012 – when it comes to underperforming politicians, insane laws, over-reaching judiciary, corrupt bureaucrats, and failing currencies, the problem is The Media. None of the lackluster or self-serving talent on display would be able to continue for long if the media exposed them and relentlessly demanded logic, reason, evidence and manners.
It’s what is not said that matters.
Source: The Australian
Australians trust the armed forces, universities, and the police.
The gloss of universities is striking — they are riding on the rigor and achievements of past generations.
The last survey I saw (about May 2011) showed that 50% of Australians still think we need to do something about “the climate”, so none of those people have even the faintest idea of how some parts of our universities are not that different to the Press Corp — just wait til the sordid details of Climategate, lost data, and hidden files surface and the people find out how impartial and trustworthy those universities have been.
Even though voters don’t trust the media, in Australia, the MSM is still very influential. When election time comes, only 10% of the voters followed it through the internet. It’s rising fast, but fully 56% of people followed the election through their television or newspaper. We have five real channels (with many spinoff channel variants of late) and two of the five are government funded in part or in full. There is no Fox News in Australia.
...
Assuming that the internet remains largely free, that MSM influence can only fall, but why assume that free speech will stay free? The government censors are becoming ever more blatant – yesterday ruling that the media are not allowed to photograph asylum seekers arriving in boats.
Some time ago, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, dissident Czech novelist Zdener Urbanek observed: “In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know it’s propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West, we’ve learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive”.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
The establishment will keep asking for more until something stops it… and what stops it growing? Nothing except us. It grows until the protests become too strong. We must not only protest just to keep what is ours (our freedom) but we must teach our children that protesting unwanted laws is a fact of life.
The NCDC ocean (blue) and global (brown) monthly temperature anomalies (relative to the 1900-2000 average temperatures) since 1980. The observed temperatures compared to the predictions made in the first IPCC report. Note that the width of the predictions is ±0.1°C, which is roughly the size of the month to month fluctuations in the temperature anomalies.
Recent Comments