Paul Biegler has some words of wisdom in The Age, but unfortunately he mixed up a few vital terms up in his pop-psychosocial-analysis.
Once again, the projection of the alarmist’s own inner headspace is rampant. Those without the ability to reason keep “finding” that inability in those who can. (It makes sense, a brain needs to use logic to recognize logic)*. Not surprisingly, surveys also show that skeptics are more literate and numerate than believers.
Those who adopt fashionable ideas to impress their friends assume their opponents behave in the same unscientific way. I have to sympathise with them. How else can they explain the mismatch between their chosen prophets and their busted prophecies?
The corrected version of this article in The Age. I’ve taken some savage edits of the article (colored like this) and corrected the terms.
“Climate scepticsalarmists might just be captive to basic emotions”
Instant gratification is a powerful, but flawed, human motivator.
Searching for that perfect Christmas gift for your climate alarmist friend? You could do worse than slinging them a book like Emotional Intelligence, Plimer’s, Carter’s or Bookers. Why? Research is mounting that your friend is the victim of a brain glitch. More particularly, he has been derailed by an emotional response and has capitulated to the pleasure of the here and now. He wants to fit in with his peers, to be fashionable, and to look “smart”. How better than to parade his moral superiority by adopting the notion that man-made global warming is real, and he is a saint because he recycles The Age to save the planet? How better to look smart than to pour scorn on “skeptics”?
The bad news is, all fashions change, and cheap tricks will come back to bite him. Because he did no research before he derided “deniers” he didn’t realize what an idiot he would look like when the deniers turned out to be professors, nobel prize winners, engineers, number crunchers, and other savvy people who’ve been on the Earth for decades. It’s time to warn him there will be no fashionista points soon in looking like the dupe who swallowed bizarre lines about coal miners causing cyclones. I mean, really?
Climate scepticism alarmism is a strong candidate example of temporal discounting — people taking the easy road to get instant gratification now, and avoiding the cost. Hundreds of scientific papers and notable scientists point to reams of evidence that natural cycles are more likely to be warming the planet. Yet, doing the research and speaking of your skepticism will cost you real pleasure now. For starters, research takes time, it’s hard work to actually form your own opinion rather than just be a parrot. Then if you admit your skepticism publicly, people will look at you in disdain. Indeed you’ll lose friends. There’s no reward in being exiled.
I don’t have a horse in the Peak Oil race, but Energy Security is too important to let the government “disappear” inconvenient reports. As David Archibald points out, at one time the Australian Government went to great lengths to make sure we would be more self sufficient. Lately there are times when Australia doesn’t even have three months supply.– Jo
World Annual Discovery (red) and Production of Oil (Blue) See below for details.
The White Paper contains a number of strange statements and inanities:
Page 67: “For a major global energy exporter like Australia, pursuing a goal of national energy self‐sufficiency is counterintuitive.”
Page 69: “Energy security does not equate to energy independence or self‐sufficiency in any particular energy source.”
Page 123: “As a result of increased daily net imports in recent years, the level of oil stocks in Australia has regularly fallen below the 90‐day requirement since mid‐2010. The National Energy Security Assessment found that this does not indicate an emerging domestic energy security problem. However, Australia’s stockholding obligation is an important compliance issue under an international treaty that is intended to be a credible response mechanism to a major global oil supply disruption. The Australian Government is currently considering possible options to respond to this issue.”
It is interesting that the Federal Government wants Australia to be an example to the World with the carbon tax, but is also aware that it is breaking a treaty obligation with respect to oil stock levels.
What is most interesting about the Energy White Paper is what it does not mention. That is Report 117 produced by the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics which in turn is part of the Department of Infrastructure and Transport. Anthony Albanese is the Minister.
Report 117 is entitled “Transport energy futures: long-term oil supply trends and projections”. This report was not only not mentioned in the White Paper, it has been disappeared from the Departmental website. No reference to it exists. As ASPO notes on its website – “This report is no longer available from BITRE, but no reason has been given for its withdrawal.The report is available on a French website [PDF].
So an Australian Government report is not available on an Australian Government website but is available on a French website.
Why would that be?
It would be because Report 117 contradicts the findings of the Energy White Paper which says,”Demand for petroleum fuels will continue to be strong, although this will be increasingly met by a growing level of imported product through well‐established and proven supply chains.”
Report 117 is the best analysis of peak oil that I have seen
…the World’s oil supply is going to fall off a cliff.
It is a very detailed, thorough, and methodically correct report forecasting oil supply to the end of the century. What it says is that the World’s oil supply is going to fall off a cliff. The words the report actually uses are, ”A predicted shallow decline in the short run should give way to a steeper decline after 2016.”
Figure 13.9 from the report sums up the situation:
A small group of selected rulers just raised a hand, changed the rules, and sent billions of dollars from some people to some others.
This type of arbitrary control over the carbon market shows why it is a misnomer to call it a “free” market, and why a “market” is the wrong tool to try to use to reduce emissions. CO2 is a universal molecule, found in every walk of life and many inanimate processes. We can’t include them all, and someone somewhere gets to decide which ones count and which ones don’t, and how many of them we are allowed to emit in the first place.
Supply and demand of CO2 emissions are not set by a free market (you know, voluntary and willing participants exchanging things for mutual benefit). The bureaucrats just mandated an illusion of market forces, within a range set by said ‘crats. The price of carbon credits had gotten too painfully low for the rulers and their patrons and fans, so something had to be “done”. They made the carbon caps more stringent. If the price was too high, they would have loosened them (and they admit as much below). This has nothing to do with the environment or science, and everything to do with a plutocracy charging “what it can get away with”.
Now, are they doing this more for your benefit, or theirs? Cui bono?
Any efficiency gains we get from the “free market” are destroyed by the losses due to corruption.
Carbon allowances rose as much as 32 percent on speculation that an amendment to an energy efficiency law voted today raised the likelihood of the EU curbing oversupply and supporting prices in its emissions trading system. Concern that the new energy- savings regulations will further cut demand for pollution rights at a time of economic slowdown helped knock carbon prices to a four-year low last week.
It’s well written, packed with references, and has an unapologetic, irreverent tone.
If you are a skeptical teacher, this is an essential book; if you are an alarmist teacher, it’s doubly so. This is the ammunition that smart teenagers will use to point score against you. (Be prepared, eh?)
My only grievance with this book is that Plimer got this excellent title before me 😉
Following on from blackbody discussions, here is Christopher Monckton’s simple account of how we know the IPCC is exaggerating climate sensitivity. This comes from page 12 of Moncktons: Regulation without reason (on the Canadian coal regulations.)
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Guest Post: Christopher Monckton
Are the IPCC’s global-warming projections proving accurate?
IPCC (2007, scenario A2) expects 3.4 C° manmade global warming to 2100. The calculations so far in this paper have assumed that the IPCC is right. Environment Canada does not ask any questions about the IPCC’s global-warming projections. Officials should have made some allowance for IPCC overshoot.
Since 1750, whence IPCC dates our influence on climate, a recent study (Blasing, 2011) shows 3 W m–2 of forcing from our greenhouse-gas emissions, less –1 W m–2 from non-GHG influences (IPCC, 2007). Global temperature had risen by 0.5 C° from 1750-1983 (Hansen, 1984), with a further 0.3 C° since (HadCRUt3, 2011). Of this 0.8 C° warming, 50 to 100% may be manmade. Thus, the 261-year transient climate sensitivity parameter is (0.4 to 0.8)/(3 – 1) = 0.2 to 0.4 C° W–1 m2. Multiplying by the forcing at CO2 doubling, i.e. 5.35 ln 2 (Myhre et al., 2001, cited by IPCC, 2001, 2007), gives transient sensitivity of 0.75 to 1.5 C° by 2100, when CO2 concentration will have doubled. Dividing this value by 0.7, the fraction of all forcings attributable to CO2, allows for non-CO2 forcings. Expected warming would thus be 1.1 to 2.1 C° to 2100, 32 to 62% of IPCC’s central estimate.
Since 1850, the year when the first global-temperature record was kept, the most rapid rate of warming sustained for more than a decade was 0.17 C°/decade (HadCRUt3, 2011). Assume that, after no warming in the 2000s, this maximum supra-decadal warming rate were to become the average rate for the next nine decades. Warming would be 1.5 C° by 2100, 44% of IPCC’s central estimate.
Since 1950, when Man first began emitting enough CO2 to influence the climate, 0.72 C° of warming has occurred (HadCRUt3, 2011). This rate, extrapolated from the past 61 years to the next 90, gives 1.1 C° of warming by 2100. Assuming 20 to 40% acceleration in the warming rate to allow for rising CO2 concentrations net of the logarithmic diminution in the CO2 forcing gives 1.3 to 1.5 C° warming to 2100.
I wrote to Christopher Monckton a while back to ask him about a post Blackbody – the key error in climate science, and bless his soul, he whipped off a letter with his detailed answer and wrote it all back to me, saying that other people were asking him about that too. It’s a shame to keep it hidden and high time I brought it out. Usually this topic generates quite a discussion. Though, warning (!) it contains equations, and primarily discusses the physics of blackbody radiation from Earth. It is essentially a debate about the core physics among a few skeptics. The most curious thing being that this time — this blog is on the mainstream end of opinions. (Yes, I think there is a greenhouse effect as I explained here and here).
Huffman asserts there is no measureable greenhouse effect on Venus and Earth and that the temperatures of both planets is determined by their distance to the sun. (Michael Hammer responded to that with an explanation of why we know There is a Greenhouse Effect on Venus). My unsophisticated thought was that if distance explained it all, then ergo, albedo would have no effect at all — as in zero — and it seems hard to believe that a black planet and a white planet the same distance from the sun would be at identical temperatures. (It doesn’t gel with my experience of a white car vs black car parked in the baking sun.) – Jo
…Huffman makes a point about albedo himself:
You cannot “correct for albedo” to use the Stefan-Boltzmann equation at the Earth’s surface, because a blackbody by definition has no albedo to “correct” for. This of course was confirmed in my previous Venus/Earth analysis, which showed there is simply no room for an albedo effect upon the long-term mean temperatures in the atmospheres of Venus and Earth
Guest Post: Christopher Monckton replies explaining the four errors of this reasoning
The posting begins by making the common error of assuming that a blackbody cannot have an albedo. Of course it can. The Stefan-Boltzmann equation accounts for albedo in the simplest possible way: by simply taking it that the fraction of incident radiation that is reflected away by the albedo of the Earth plays no part in the radiative transfer at the characteristic-emission surface. Here is how it’s done.
The characteristic-emission surface of the Earth is not the surface we stand on. It is about 5 km up in the troposphere, varying quite a bit with latitude. At that surface, by definition, incoming and outgoing radiative fluxes balance, and there are no non-radiative fluxes as there are at the Earth’s surface.
Fenbeagle does the full Star Wars parody for Christmas, check it out! This is just a part. But before you go, if you haven’t already read the letter from Tallblokes attorney, see below. All jokes aside, we don’t want the establishment to think they can get away with invasions of privacy like this. UVA spent $1million helping Mann to hide the emails that the public paid him to write. Tallbloke (Roger) was just writing from home when 6 police turned up to take his computer and copy the entire contents.
Fenbeagle
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Tallbloke will pursue legal action and could use some help
Frustrated cult members know they can’t explain their faith to the rational. [See Grist]
They bombarded us with glossy brochures, with full feature documentaries, and awarded people on their team with Nobels for nothing. They spend billions of dollars of our government funds and investment monies, and, once upon a time, the full support of the EU, UK, US, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand governments, all the major financial houses of the world, and of course the supertanker of governments – the UN. They had 70% of the Western population convinced and a $144 billion dollar global trading scheme with all the patrons that engenders.
So now that it’s all going to rot and ruin, they have no ammo left. Their arsenal is reduced to namecalling and jokes that reveal the Christmas wish-list of the inner totalitarian.
Those with billions of dollars attack the mostly unpaid volunteers who are beating them. It’s emblematic that in this meeting of the “ruling class” where the joke is funny, the only people not represented in the audience of politicians and businessmen are the taxpaying citizens:
Our biggest problem is to deal with the skepticism and denial of the cult-like lemmings who would take us over the cliff,” said Brown, a Democrat, eliciting cheers and laughter from an audience of roughly 200 policymakers, businessleaders, and activists. “The skeptics and deniers have billions of dollars at their disposal ... But I can tell you we’re going to fight them every step of the way until we get this state on a sustainable path forward.”
More laughter came when Pachauri joked that Branson could give climate deniers tickets on the aviation mogul’s planned flights into outer space. “Perhaps it could be a one-way ticket,” Pachauri said, smiling, “though I’m not sure space deserves them.” [Source: Grist]
The alarmist cult needs to keep that myth alive about the money. Could it be that the only way they can “reason” about the planetary atmosphere is to “follow the money”, even if that money doesn’t exist? (Is monetary influence the only way they can think?) Or is it simply that they deny the facts about climate that are defeating them as they leak out to the public over the Internet, so they pretend they were beaten instead by big money and PR?
Anything to avoid the dreaded “we were wrong”, that all us little people — whom they’ve been calling idiots in every possible way for years — might be right. After all, wasn’t this issue supposed to prove their intellectual superiority once and for all and therefore give them (in their minds) a mandate to govern over us?
The low price, 6.3 Euro, is equivalent to about $8 Australian or US.
The Australian government signed us up to pay $23A with a floor at $15 (and they think that they are creating a “free” market.)
By Thomson Reuters Point Carbon
LONDON | Wed Dec 14, 2011 12:01pm EST LONDON (Reuters) –
EU carbon prices fell to their lowest ever level on Wednesday ...
The ICE ECX December 2011 EUA contract fell 73 cents to an all-time low of 6.30 euros, down 10.4 percent on Tuesday’s 7.03-euro settlement. By 16.30 GMT, the contract had recovered slightly to 6.41 euros on healthy turnover of around 15 million units.
The drop sends the contract into unchartered territory, falling well below its previous low of 6.77 euros on December 6 as market traders saw few signs of respite in the EU economy to boost demand for emission permits.
BREAKING: As Jeff ID says, “The Empire Strikes Back”
Industrial wall in Donetsk, Ukraine. Photo: Борис У.
UPDATED: See Washington Examiner story below.
Tallbloke’s computers were confiscated by police today, allegedly in the search for the climategate leaker. But it’s obvious that there won’t be any clues left on Tallbloke’s computer (it would have no record of comments dropped onto wordpress.com, a US service). See Watts Up.
The point of this is not to catch the leaker, it’s to intimidate bloggers.
They don’t really want to catch the leaker, because a whistleblower is protected by UK legislation. The proof that this is aimed at intimidating bloggers rather than catching the climategate leaker is the coordinated and pointless US dept of Justice action through wordpress. To wit:
Both Tallbloke and JeffID received “the following notification from the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division and forwarded by Ryan at WordPress. ClimateAudit is also mentioned yet I’m not certain that Steve Received notice. It seems that the larger paid blogs may not have received any notice. On pdf –WordPress Preservation Request-1“
The notification apparently asks them not to make the information public or else... they may terminate their wordpress account.
This has nothing at all to do with finding a hypothetical hacker.
How would anyone feel knowing that agents may turn up at their home, take all their computers, phones, routers and records, and have a copy of all their emails, their tax records, letters to friends, music, photos, information about family and friends, and their passwords?
The inconvenience of living without their computer, software and everything else would cost potentially thousands but worse, for someone who values their privacy, just the knowledge that so much personal information was in the hands of strangers would be unsettling.
Furthermore, there’s the risk that a single malicious person in the government could “leak” the emails, photos, or letters, medical records and spread them on the internet. These are home offices, so everything is on the computer. It would only take one agent — someone thinking it was “only fair” to release all that information. There’s a perverse logic that though the climategate leaker carefully removed personal emails, and was releasing work related information from a work account, it was somehow “just” to release irrelevant personal information from the accounts of volunteers.
If the establishment was really in the mood to send a signal that blogging is a risky business, what’s next — Nixon style tax audits?
Now, more than ever, all the people that value their freedom need to stick together. Whistleblowers and radio personalities need blogger back up, big bloggers need small bloggers, every blogger needs commenter and emailer support, with letters to editors and friends. Every link in the chain helps. The establishment need to know that we will not be intimidated, there are many of us, and the more they push, the more we will tell the world.
Spread the information on the net while we still can
Geoff Sherrington analyzes the words in the Durban agreement, and finds a telling tale of politics, money and influence, but not one of probability, maths, food, shelter or freedom (which do not appear at all). The word science appears 6 times in 21,313 words. It’s the mere token excuse that underlies everything else. This is a legal style document, so it is to be expected that it’s dominated by “parties” and “reports” but given the uncertainties involved in predicting the climate, a rational document, designed to serve the people, would surely include statistics, cost benefits, and mentions of probabilities. But then, we always knew that the big greenhouse scare was not about the emissions or the atmosphere, but about status, power and money. — Jo
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By guest author Geoff Sherrington.
The killing fields of Durban have produced agreement by many countries to one of the more extraordinary and preposterous documents one could read. It is so contrived by the UN that it is hard to know if it is the correct document, or maybe an unadopted working draft in progress.
The winners and losers at Durban were? The losers were the John and Joan Citizens of the World, who became poorer as the curtain fell on Durban.The winners, a group of wealthy, heartless individuals, many with (shall we say, to avoid libel) interesting backgrounds.The political war was won by the early placement of key people in positions where, after 2 decades of promotion, many became influential enough to dominate the political numbers. Of course, this tactic took money, because the common driver was money. The wealthy seek to drive change because more money can be made during change than in the quiet periods between.
Alas, at Durban, the science was not discussed in this document. Discussion was overtly political and the outcome overtly communist in the worst sense of that word. The word ‘science’ appears 6 times in this document of 300KB and 56 pages with a count of 21,313 words.
Here is one of the paragraphs about Science from the Durban document, with 2 of the 6 uses of the word ‘science’ from a total count of 21,313 words:
“(Previous work) recognizes that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet, and thus requires to be urgently addressed by all Parties, Recognizing that deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required according to science, and as documented in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with a view to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions so as to hold the increase in global average temperature below 2 °C above preindustrial levels, and that Parties should take urgent action to meet this long-term goal, consistent with science and on the basis of equity;……”
In the meantime, here is a simple word analysis of the content of the Durban document. For comparison, the word count use gives ‘and’ 175 times and ‘the’ 381 times.
Enron was jubilant when the Kyoto agreement was put forward
Here’s a legacy exhibit from the historical annals of How the Global Warming Scam Grew. You can see the cogs of the industrial machine picking up the “green theme”, becoming patrons of eco-legislation, and pouring money and influence into any big-government scheme that also promises them big profits. This is exactly the unholy alliance of Big-Finance with Big-Government that I described in the Climate Scare Machine Map. The email below documents one part of that self-fulfilling cycle where the taxpayers and citizens get screwed, corporates and politicians win, and the environment is irrelevant. The Greens ought be ashamed their naivety and ambition was so easily gamed by the real powers-behind-the-scenes.
Robert Bradley Jr. was working for Enron in 1998, and saw Enron lobbying for profits in the green sector. Bradley’s name was on the “to” list of this email below (perhaps with the wrong address because it did not arrive). He only saw the email when another man asked Bradley what he thought of it, and Bradley asked him to forward the message.
Subject: Implications of the Climate Change Agreement in Kyoto & What Transpired
Implications
If implemented, this agreement will do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring of the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States. The potential to add incremental gas sales, and additional demand for renewable technology is enormous. In addition, a carbon emissions trading system will be developed. While the trading system will be implemented by 2008, I am sure that reductions will begin to trade with 1-2 years. Finally, Enron has immediate business opportunities which derive directly from this agreement.
The endorsement of joint implementation within Annex-1 is exactly what I have been lobbying for and it seems like we won.
Good news. The talented strategists left the UNFCCC team before COP17 in Durban. The A-graders saw the trainwreck coming and moved on.
Everyone knows it’s a herculean task to get 190-odd countries to sign anything, and with a typical pragmatical approach the UN drafting team have gone for … not just a new “International Court” (crikey!) but rights for Mother Earth (can we be sued by a rock?), and oh boy, the holy grail, the whole kit and caboodle … we demand Peace On Earth, and a Partridge in a Pear Tree, as Part 47a, and starting by morning tea tomorrow.
Monckton reports that the funereal collapsing Durban talks still held the highest of ambitions. Godlike even. The real action behind the posters of parrots and pleas to save pygmy corals, or spotted limpets is the plea to make some unelected bureaucrats the totalitarian Kings of The World.
In part it’s chilling, a New International Court — which could presumably try you for crimes against coastlines, clouds, or (more likely) against endangered windfarms. Those with their hands on the legal wheel want the power to direct money (was that $1.6 Trillion?) from the richest nations to their friends, patrons, or pet causes. If they became the anointed Kings, it would swiftly become a crime to speak doubts of climate models upon which billions of trades depends. The darkest evil always comes cloaked with helpful intentions.
Fortunately, what’s left of the UN strategic team is even lower caliber than B-grade, beyond Z, somewhere into hexadecimal.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the grown-ups in the IPCC-support-team left the party sometime after Copenhagen, and the Z++ team are left to guard the bones. No one can take this wild ambit claim seriously.
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
The Gods of PR and marketing sing,
a landmark deal — lo and behold!
To wave and laud, and on which to cling.
Of course, at the 28th hour of extended play they had to announce something “landmark” and thus they did. All you need to know about their success is written in the following paragraph:
“The deal doesn’t explicitly compel any nation to take on emissions targets, although most emerging economies have volunteered to curb the growth of their emissions.”
That’s the good news. The bad news is they still got our money:
Sunday’s deal also set up the bodies that will collect, govern and distribute tens of billions of dollars a year for poor countries. Other documents in the package lay out rules for monitoring and verifying emissions reductions, protecting forests, transferring clean technologies to developing countries and scores of technical issues.
The reports from green observers offer us much insight:
Environmentalists criticized the package – as did many developing countries in the debate – for failing to address what they called the most urgent issue, to move faster and deeper in cutting carbon emissions.
“The good news is we avoided a train wreck,” said Alden Meyer, recalling predictions a few days ago of a likely failure. “The bad news is that we did very little here to affect the emissions curve.”
Local governments are ruling on what people can do with their own land if it happens to be near seas recorded as rising at a frightening 1mm per year. Home owners are losing options and home value, not because of the rising water, but because of rising nonsense.
Let’s assume that IPCC projections might, incredibly, actually come to pass — why don’t the councils just get all residents to sign a clause before they buy or renovate. We the residents and potential residents, won’t mind signing that we have seen The Official Council Climate Warning:
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“The IPCC estimates the oceans may rise by (insert wild prediction here).
The council cannot be held responsible for the weather, and will not hold back the ocean.
Buy or renovate at your own risk!”
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Who has more incentive to assess the threats to a house (your house): a/ you, the homeowner who just hocked yourself to the grave and wants to live in it, hand it to your kids, or on-sell it for a decent quid; or b/ the local councillors who will never set foot in it, and won’t be councillors by the time said threat may or may not occur?
Not to mention that Councillors are equipped to assess complex coastal threats just like any bricklayer, newsagent, pharmacist, teacher, unionist or minor career politician would be. In other words — Not.
In a true free society, people could make up their own minds about the likelihood of the predictions made by UN committees which quote Greenpeace reports, and whose own lead authors say things like: “All the models are wrong” (but only when they don’t think anyone is listening).
If the IPCC are right, only silly skeptical fools will have wasted their money (and why would the council care about them?). If the IPCC are wrong, the only losers are the bed-wetting patsies who believed them and sold out a bit cheap to move for an uphill house. I say, let the people decide.
Fifty years from now, no one would blame the current council if erosion, or even a storm surge led to property damage. In 2062, disgruntled home owners who have to fork out for a small sea-wall certainly won’t be suing the 2012 Council.
It’s time elected representatives stopped treating voters as if they were children.
A blockbuster Chinese study of Tibetan tree rings by Liu et al 2011 shows, with detail, that the modern era is a dog-standard normal climate when compared to the last 2,500 years. The temperature, the rate of change — it’s all been seen before. Nothing about the current period is “abnormal”, indeed the current warming period in Tibet can be produced through calculation of cycles. Liu et al do a Fourier analysis on the underlying cycles and do brave predictions as well.
In Tibet, it was about the same temperature on at least four occasions — back in late Roman times (those chariots!), then again in the dark ages (blame the collapse of industry), then in the middle ages (the Vikings?), then in modern times (blame the rise of industry).
Clearly, these climate cycles have nothing to with human civilization. Their team finds natural cycles of many different lengths are at work: 2-3 years, 100 years, 199 years, 800 years, and 1,324 years. The cold periods are associated with sunspot cycles. What we are not used to seeing are brave scientists willing to publish exact predictions of future temperatures for 100 years that include rises and falls. Apparently, it will cool til 2068, then warm again, though not to the same warmth as 2006 levels.
On “tree-rings”
Now some will argue that skeptics scoff at tree rings, and we do — sometimes — especially ones based on the wrong kind of tree (like the bristlecone) or ones based on small samples (like Yamal), ones with aberrant statistical tricks that produce the same curve regardless of the data (Mann’s hockey-stick), and especially ones that truncate data because it doesn’t agree with thermometers placed near air-conditioner outlets and in carparks (Mann again). Only time will tell if this analysis has nailed it, but, yes, it is worthy of our attention.
Some will also, rightly, point out this is just Tibet, not a global average. True. But the results agree reasonably well with hundreds of other studies from all around the world (from Medieval times, Roman times, the Greenland cores). Why can’t we do solid tree-ring analysis like this from many locations?
Jo
Amplitudes, rates, periodicities and causes of temperature variations in the past 2,485 years and future trends over the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau [Chinese Sci Bull,]
Figure 5 Prediction of temperature trends on the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau for the next 120 years. Blue line, initial series; orange line, calibration series, 464 BC–834 AD; purple line, verification series, 835–1980 AD; red line, forecasting series, 1980–2134 AD. (Click to enlarge)
There are beautiful graphs. Have a look at the power spectrum analysis and the cycles below…
Cover: Australian Resources and Investment Dec 2011
The key messages are not lost on the bright and influential, and even if the mass-media avoid the evidence, the facts are quietly storming their way through the echelons of power. For the future historians, here’s a glimpse of how information networks grow and evolve behind the scenes.
Once upon a time, the missing hot spot and the water vapor amplification were virtually unknown. In Jan 2009 2010, Tony Kelly (a member of the Royal Society) met David and me privately in Perth. He grasped the implications of the model amplification in a flash. There’s a world of difference between the certainty of the 1.2 C direct effect of CO2, and the highly uncertain assumptions that push it up to 3.3 C. Three months later, not coincidentally, the Royal Society was approached by deeply concerned skeptical members, and had to formally reconsider its position.
In June this year, we were lucky enough to dine with Matt Ridley, who likewise picked up the message, and is spreading it — see his acclaimed speech in November. A few weeks ago, I noticed Lord Lawson and Lord Turnbull similarly argued the same meme (though I don’t know that we deserve any direct credit for that).
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Internet is the gift of gifts. How easy would it have been for the government departments, coopted scientists, and obedient media to have gotten away with the outrageous scam of forcing us to pay to change the weather? Their lock on the mainstream media would have made it easy to disguise the truth. And yet, it crumbles (all bar the Antipodes).
Then last week, I met Gina Rinehart at the Mannkal Christmas party, and she was keen to let me know that she’d mentioned David and the key points of evidence in an article for the Australian Resources and Investment publication.
A day later, Gina Rinehart was disappointed and surprised that the editors decided to cut her description of the scientific evidence — though those of us who explain science have learnt to expect that. (It’s as if editors are deathly afraid a scientific argument might bore the readers, when here, below, if readers didn’t already know it, are the blockbuster points that back up her claims.) It’s clear she is well versed. She’s carefully picked out the most important points. I’m grateful she’s given me permission to reprint the excerpts of her article, most especially the unpublished parts. Naturally, any credit for what Gina knows belongs to Gina, but — credit where credit is due — thanks to Monckton, Carter and Plimer too.
And lest anybody misunderstand, I take no credit at all for shifting Gina to a skeptical view — given that she’s been surrounded by Geologists for decades — it’s hard to imagine she was ever un-skeptical.
Resources the life-raft in an economic storm
By Gina Rinehart
Gina Rinehart
See the published article here. Below is the scientific evidence that was in the original, but not in the final printed copy.
“Australia was able to withstand the global economic crisis of 2008/2009 due to its fundamental strength in natural resources…
“Now as a recession approaches is not the time to burden Australia with carbon (dioxide) tax and MRRT, and nor is a carbon (dioxide) tax necessary in any event.
Please consider the following scientific evidence:
1. The atmosphere currently has <0.04% CO2, in former times it was up to 30%. Six of the six great ice ages formed at a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide was far higher than now. Clearly, this did not drive warming.
2. For 80% of past geological time, planet Earth has been warmer than today, with far more CO2 in the atmosphere. Clearly, this warming was neither irreversible nor catastrophic.
3. At times in the past (Carboniferous, Cretaceous, Eocene) the Earth experienced sudden injections of CO2 into the atmosphere. In response, the planet warmed slightly but less than daily changes we experience now and not in an irreversible or catastrophic way.
What do skeptics have to do to break the spell of government appointed experts?
Many journalists are apparently trapped in a fit of ideological blindness — they can’t acknowledge emails leaked from their favourite scientists. What do you do when your religious idol turns out to be a mere fallible human — caught deleting emails, hiding data and pretending that their models are accurate when they privately admit they’re “all wrong”? The “overwhelming evidence” for the prophecies of a coming man-made disaster are exposed in the emails as based on biased research, petty trickery, flawed assumptions and an all too human desire to “keep me employed”.
The trance of big-government appointed prophets is so strong, skeptics such as Christopher Monckton and Craig Rucker (CFACT) are going to skydive into Durban to see if they can shake journalists out of their stupor.
The big jump will happen at 11am Durban time (5pm Perth, 8pm Sydney, 9am London, and 4am New York time.) Right now!
And if that doesn’t work, what next? Do they take off their clothes?!
From Marc Morano and Climate Depot:
Climategate 2.0 parachutes into COP17: – Skeptics risk life and limb free-falling from 3000 feet to draw attention to Climategate 2.0 — The skeptical skydiving team will land at Toti beach. Media and all interested persons are invited to the beach to observe the landing’ – (Parachutes will be double checked for potential sabotage by warmists 🙂
CFACT skydivers to tow banners into UN Durban conference
Lord Monckton, Craig Rucker, Climate Depot to parachute
Emails exposing biased science cannot be ignored
The Daily Telegraph exposed the NSW state government protecting the world from some dangerous scientific analysis of sea-levels. The officials pulled papers and posters within days of when they were due to be released, late in September 2011. Doug Lord examined 120 years of tidal data from Sydney Harbour, and found a 1 mm year on year rise which didn’t fit with the 900 mm rise projected by the Wizards of Climate Change at the Department. He finds the official figures exaggerate ten fold.
Ken Stewart has taken the dangerous data from 19 sites around Australia and finds it averaged 1.4 mm/year over the last 100 years. He finds about an 8-fold exaggeration. This is another sordid tale in the Science-perverted-for-PR category.
The mean sea-level rise recorded at 19 stations around Australia (warning, data is limited in the first half of the series). The trend is a steady rise. The last 20 years is not unusual.
Seas have been rising in a reasonably continuous trend around the world since 1800. The last two decades are not unusual.
The other headline I could have used: Jo Nova and Watts Up graphs used in UEA lectures!
It doesn’t get much better than this. Imagine finding out your work helped to support a university course in a place right at the center of the dogma and unscientific reasoning you are working to expose? Well I’m chuffed. 🙂
Allan Kendall is a lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA) with principles and an open mind, who gave his students the whole story. I applaud his brave approach, he would have known he risked castigation and exile in his workplace, and that there would be little reward.
Curiously a small storm erupted on Bishop Hill. Alan Kendall is defending UEA, saying that not everyone or every branch of research at UEA ought to be tarnished with the poor behaviour of the Climate Research Unit. And his behaviour rather proves his point, but many commenters at UEA are bagging him for expecting anyone to take UEA seriously, and in a sense they are right too. Therein lies the rub.
People of Kendall’s quality are either rare or silent at UEA. As long as the Chancellor of UEA continues to deny that it was wrong for the Climate Research Unit to hide and lose data and methods, or wrong to destroy emails subject to FOI’s, or wrong to hide declines, or wrong to manipulate the peer review process, then UEA deserves a shellacking in my opinion, even as Allan Kendall deserves high praise. It’s been a lonely battle for him. The world needs to see more of the UEA workers and students protesting that one small group is dragging their reputation down. Those other good workers like Kendall did not do anything wrong, and did not ask for this reputational disaster to be imposed on them, but the test has come. Will the workers of UEA stand up for the tenets of science? Will they allow their university to be called the “University of Easy Access”, and the name UEA to be synonymous with corruption?
Sadly it’s not just UEA where scientific standards are haphazard. Can anyone name a university anywhere in the world where the Science Department maintains good practices and speaks out against? My alma mater, the University of Western Australia, allows Stephen Lewandowsky to utter anti-science, bizarre, “psychological” comments on how anyone who dissents from the government-approved-opinion has a mental condition and a faulty brain. The Soviets would have given Lewandowsky a job in a flash. Yet UWA Science stands silently by as if breaking laws of reason is a fair thing. (See The death of reason at UWAThe hypocrisy of the annointed,Picasso Brain Syndrome and other of my posts about Lewandowsky)
Kendall was the lone voice of reason working with UEA to do the right thing
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Australian sea level rises exaggerated by 8 fold (or maybe ten)
The Daily Telegraph exposed the NSW state government protecting the world from some dangerous scientific analysis of sea-levels. The officials pulled papers and posters within days of when they were due to be released, late in September 2011. Doug Lord examined 120 years of tidal data from Sydney Harbour, and found a 1 mm year on year rise which didn’t fit with the 900 mm rise projected by the Wizards of Climate Change at the Department. He finds the official figures exaggerate ten fold.
Ken Stewart has taken the dangerous data from 19 sites around Australia and finds it averaged 1.4 mm/year over the last 100 years. He finds about an 8-fold exaggeration. This is another sordid tale in the Science-perverted-for-PR category.
Sea Level Change in Australia: What’s Likely?
The mean sea-level rise recorded at 19 stations around Australia (warning, data is limited in the first half of the series). The trend is a steady rise. The last 20 years is not unusual.
Seas have been rising in a reasonably continuous trend around the world since 1800. The last two decades are not unusual.
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