Recent Posts
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Lucky us, The UN deigns to not list the Great Barrier Reef as ‘in danger’ (yet again)
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Wednesday
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Blackouts and maintenance problems hit farmers forced onto solar and batteries in Western Australia
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Tuesday
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Monday
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One Nation are now the Party of the workers, and Labor the party of wealth and academics
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Net Zero anyone? USA bets big on coal and gas — overtakes China in spending.
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Winning: Trump persuades The World Bank to drop its huge spending target on “climate”
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Bafflement?! Germany, a global leader in renewables but has one of the highest EU electricity prices
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Wednesday
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Horse-drawn carriages must have caused a Megadrought in Europe in 1540, right?
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Tuesday
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Monday
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UK facing devastating 36 degree heat — can’t decide whether to use air conditioners or rip them out
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Batteries failed on day One: A four day wind drought in South Australia wreaks havoc, high prices
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The UN wants to be One World Government and it starts with a carbon tax on ships and planes
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Thursday
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What if Global Warming was just because something made the clouds go away…
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Wednesday
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Snowy 2.0 is the Trillion dollar Black Hole of Australia — sucking in energy, money, land, industrial relations, the dollar, our lifestyle
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Winter Solstice
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Saturday
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We were throwing-renewable-energy away at record levels in 2025
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Pauline Hanson, the centrist, just wants a free market in electricity, and an end to the renewable energy bribery
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Thursday
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Blame the Climate Yeti again for making your life more expensive! (It’s a smokescreen)
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The Sunrise Project funneled $343 million from overseas to push net zero
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The US government has been secretly funding 120 dangerous biolabs around the world
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New report shows renewables are a drag on our national productivity
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Well, how convenient. AI data centers have arrived to be the fall guy for the Energy Minister
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Billionaires are leaving the room with excuses — Bezos says “AI will solve climate crisis”
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 (See the Hammer link below, for more information on this graphic). If there is one topic that trumps all others in climate science, it’s ocean heat.
If there is a planetary imbalance in energy, and Earth is acquiring more heat than it’s losing, we ought to be able to find that heat. Energy can not be created nor destroyed. It has to be somewhere.
On this Water-Planet, virtually every scientist agrees that the vast bulk of the extra energy ought be stored in the water. The oceans cover 70% of the surface, and are 4km deep; water has a high heat capacity (meaning it can store a lot of energy), and, because water flows quickly (unlike rock), turbulence and mixing can take that heat energy away from the surface.
Every skeptic (and taxpayer) ought to know that since 2003 (when we started measuring oceans properly) the oceans have been cooling: Douglass and Knox 2010.
Five years of planetary heating amounts to a massive amount of energy. That’s 2,000 days of the sun bearing down on an atmosphere with growing levels of CO2. According to the IPCC favored models, the extra heat stored should be 0.7 x 1022 Joules per year (or 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules per annum or 7,000 quintillion joules).
The oceans cause a lot of “noise” in our climate — the water is 4km deep and mostly close to freezing, even in the depths under the tropics. When the ocean is “stirred” cold water wells up and sucks the heat out of the atmosphere giving us a La Nina and a cooler year. When the ocean is calm, the massive stores of “cold” stay sequestered below, the surface water warms faster, and satellite record an El Nino warm spike. Figuring out the effects of CO2 with surface thermometers is difficult because of this noise and variability. But the vast oceans are the giant storage depots for heat content year after year.
 Positions of the floats that have delivered data within the last 30 days (AIC, updated daily) The Argo buoy network uses 3,000 floating thermometers that spread through the worlds oceans and dive 2,000 m deep. They record the temperatures and radio them back when they surface every couple of weeks. It is the gold standard in measuring ocean temperatures. Argo became operational in mid-2003; before then we relied on erratic and highly uncertain measurements from boats. (See The UCSD Argo website.)
 Figure 1. Ocean heat content from Argo (left scale: blue, original data; red, filtered) and ocean surface temperatures (right scale, green). Conversion of the OHC slope to W/m2 is made by multiplying by 0.62, yielding –0.161 W/m2. Figure 4 From Knox & Douglass page 1. OHC (Ocean Heat Content) From Douglass and Knox, 2010.
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9.1 out of 10 based on 148 ratings
Sorting real journalists from sock puppets is not too tricky: real investigators tell you what the story is about; PR writers tell you what to think.
Do they “discuss” ClimateGate emails … without quoting the emails?
Who digs for details, and who hides the evidence?
The PR writers for Big-Government were quick to come up with excuses for ClimateGate II. Which is all very well, but it’s blindingly obvious where their own personal prejudices lie if they won’t print the emails that they are supposedly discussing. It’s not so much cherry-picking, but cherry-denial. “Don’t mention the radioactive cherries, but lets discuss how cherry farmers have been victimized, talk about the history of cherry tree farming, and hear their excuses and assertions that the cherries are an essential part of our diets. Don’t mention the Geiger counter. OK?”
The top 10 excuses for PR writers who pose as “journalists” to ignore ClimateGate emails
This is standard issue damage control for ClimateGate — protect the cheats and liars, attack the whistleblower, and use excuses and padding-fillers to cover a story without actually giving the public any information on the behavior of scientists who make statements that billions of dollars of public spending is guided by.
1. “The emails are old”
(No one has seen them before, and what makes two-year-old lies acceptable now?).
2. “The timing is suspicious”
(Alarmists release alarming stuff all the time in the lead up to big meetings, but look out, it’s suspicious when a skeptic releases alarming stuff about those scientists at the same time!)
3. “They’re out of context”
(We won’t explain the context, or quote the email, trust us, they just are, OK?)
4. “The emails show a robust scientific debate”
(But that is the whole point isn’t it? We were told the “science was settled”? It is dishonest to discuss uncertainties in private while you tell the public “the debate is over” and call anyone who questions that a “denier”.)
5.“They’ve been investigated”
(Even though the investigations didn’t have these emails, didn’t investigate the science, and were at least in one case, chaired by a windfarm expert, this point is supposed to have credibility?)
6.“They’re hacked” or “stolen”
(After years of investigation there is no evidence they were hacked. They could have been leaked. Police can’t or won’t say. Does this journalist “know” something the police don’t?)
7. “Aren’t the skeptics nasty people?”
(Crikey, imagine reading emails written by paid public servants on the job about their professional work? What victims! Those poor scientists can’t even threaten journal editors, conspire to ignore peer reviewed papers they don’t like, or discuss their ignorance in private… what’s the world coming too?)
8. “This doesn’t change the science”
(Since most of “the science” is merely a consensus of these same experts, whom we are told to respect, then actually it does change “the science” when they are caught cheating.)
9. The emails “mean nothing” according the scientists caught cheating
(The sock puppet earns bonus points if those same scientists also get to slur the whistleblower and skeptics with unsubstantiated implications that “they are funded by fossil fuels”.)
10. The public response is a “yawn”
(And given how few journalists are reporting the actual emails to the public, that’s entirely predictable eh? Circular reasoning strikes again.)
Real Journalists don’t try to hide the emails
Some journalists are not apologists for scientists who delete emails, hide results, talk about “the cause”, and try to get critics sacked. Bravo, and kudos to them and the news masts that invite coverage of both sides of the story.
Amos Aikman and Graham Lloyd, The Australian: Scientists’ quest for influence in emails
Graham Lloyd, The Australian: Politics muddies the debate
James Delingpole, The Wall St Journal: Climategate 2.0
Sock Puppet Journalists — Hide the evidence
Who are they sock puppets for? Take your pick: a political philosophy, their personal religion, possibly something more banal?
Richard Black, BBC: Leads the way in creative sock-puppetry , with the definitive whitewash within hours. Chalks up seven of the top ten excuses faster than virtually anyone else.
Associated Press (via The Australian and others): Does unabashed “damage control”. Publishes the responses of the accused without ever quoting the emails themselves. A.P. quotes the University of East Anglia spokesman, quotes Michael Mann, quotes Bob Ward (PR operative for the Grantham Institute). There is no effort to quote the hot-potato emails, to discuss their significance, or to phone up the people who might interpret the results differently from the accused. Associated Press (via CBC news) “‘Desperate climate change deniers’ blamed”.
Andy Revkin, New York Times. I think Revkin sincerely believes he is an investigative journalist, and he “investigates” in a half-hearted way: he links to a few skeptical sites, he asks “climate scientists” to respond to Pielke’s point, and asks the Norwich police how much they’ve spent. But there are no direct quotes of the emails, no phone calls to skeptics or people on the other side of the emails. By writing it all off as though the first emails were already “explained”, he implies that using tricks to hide declines is a reasonable scientific practice. If scientists distort the peer review process, bully and slur critics even as they hide their own debates and uncertainty, that’s apparently all fair too. Thus he is an apologist for corruption of the scientific process. His update relies on the intellectual vacuum of the precautionary principle: “You’re Driving a Bus Full of Kids With a Curve Ahead“.
(No Andy, just because we don’t know the magnitude doesn’t mean we automatically have to spend billions. We don’t know the magnitude of the next pandemic or asteroid hit either. Look up the phrase “cost-benefits”. The magnitude matters: is it 1, 3, or 5 degrees? We have to use the observations, with rigorous scientific process in the search for the best estimate we can make. The guys who lose data, delete emails, act deceptively and behave badly are estimating 3.3C. We can do better.)
Jason Samenow, The Washington Post also won’t quote those emails, and uses at least five of the excuses above. (He scores a point for linking to skeptical sites, though he thinks he’s demonstrating “cherry picking”.)
David Wroe, Ben Cubby at The Sydney Morning Herald: Both were writing on climate change, Durban, the carbon tax and politics (here, and here) but won’t let the SMH readers know what the lead authors of IPCC reports have been caught admitting in private. There’s a few paragraphs of whitewash-in-passing from Adam Morton. Otherwise it’s almost complete denial from the rest of “team environment”. The SMH can spare column inches to tell us what Desmond Tutu thinks about climate change, but not what Professor Phil Jones thinks about the models (“They’re all wrong”.)
The Age: It’s a carbon-copy of it’s sister, the SMH. Climate-gate was announced in one whitewash story copied from Bloomberg with four of the top excuses, but no quote. There’s the same few paragraphs of whitewash-in-passing from Adam Morton. But, as with other politically incorrect topics, The Age readers are in the dark. They get no clues as to what lead authors of IPCC reports have been caught admitting in private. If a junior Exxon secretary had said: “We need to get rid of global warming” it would be a headline story repeated in their columns for decades.
ABC (US news) Ned Potter: Not a single quote from the emails.
The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): I can’t even find any mention of the latest ClimateGate release on the abc.net.au site. Can anyone else? They have a dedicated “science” team, but like the SMH they seem to be in denial that their thought leaders could have broken the law, lost key data, lied about the “certainty” and the reliability of the models — or else, and it’s worse, the journalists know the scientists are behaving badly, but still think “the science is right”, they know best, and the stupid public need to be shielded from “confusing” information.
ABC News thinks Australians are better served by knowing the details of Tim Flannery’s tour than knowing what the IPCC lead authors have been caught saying, even though the men at the forefront of the supposed “science” disagree entirely with the Flannery-PR when they write emails to each other.
Australians may rightfully wonder why they pay a billion a year in taxes for this blatant censorship.
Australian Climate Madness summed the media response up so much faster than I have. 😉
Send in more examples of sock-puppet journalists. They need to be named and shamed, and real journalists rewarded.
9.4 out of 10 based on 140 ratings
Another sign of the times. Mark this one in your history books for studies on the Rise and Fall of the Great Warming Delusion. Yes, it’s another well written piece on the religious nature of the faith some have in our ability to change the weather. But this time there are sounds of the death knell…
Jo
The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom
How do religions die? Generally they don’t, which probably explains why there’s so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can’t kill what wasn’t there to begin with.
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.
As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term “climate change” when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other “deniers.” And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 82 ratings
Things are not going too well at Durban, or anywhere in the Land Where People Want to Change the Weather.
Richard Black (BBC) admits there’s a “seismic shift” going on. (Could it be a tipping point I say?)
“The politics of the UN climate process are undergoing something of a fundamental transformation. “
It appears nearly anyone with power or influence wants to get out, or delay action on “climate change”.
Canada announced it will formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol next month, joining Japan and Russia who’ve ruled out commitments.
The EU announced it won’t act if everyone else doesn’t:
The 27-nation bloc said it accounts for about 11 percent of global emissions and that it can’t act alone on emissions blamed for damaging the environment.
As far as Durban goes, most the rest of the major emitters want to delay things.
The US, Russia and Japan were already arguing for a longer timeframe.
To the anger of small islands states, India and Brazil have joined rich nations in wanting to start talks on a legal deal no earlier than 2015.
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UPDATE: Durban Warning: Public Will Soon ‘Lose Confidence In This Travelling Circus’
…within hours of the summit’s start, most of the major players made clear their unwillingness to negotiate their positions.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 103 ratings
In the high powered risky game of whistleblowing there are ways to make the the leaker a less attractive target.
Pointman analyzes the ClimateGate whistleblower’s tactics and explains why he, she or they probably released those other 200,000 emails but kept them hidden behind the 4000-8000 character almost unbreakable password. He points out there are no emails released yet between key scientists and people in power, hence the worst, most damaging emails may be kept under a ” dead man’s hand detonator”. If politicians are afraid of what might be in those released-but-hidden emails, they may not want to expose or attack the whistleblower for fear of unleashing the other emails. The hidden emails buy the whistleblower protection.
Jo
Some thoughts and some questions about the Climategate 2.0 release
Guestpost by Pointman
Two years ago, I did what can only be described as a highly speculative profile of the climategate leaker. You can find it here. I strongly suggest you read it now or you’ll have some difficulty following the rest of this piece. Reading it again in the light of what more can be deduced about them from the second release, it holds up surprisingly well. Where it falls down very badly is not so much in its broad conclusions, which I think are basically in the ballpark, but in the whistleblower’s intensity. Boy was I wrong on that.
They’ve sat on the new material for two years and apart from one possible communication, the ”no deal was done” comment on a blog, we’ve not heard a word from them. In that time, they’ve no doubt seen their motivations both lauded and slandered and have never came forward to either accept the plaudits or defend themselves from the attacks. That shows a level of patience and self-discipline only someone on a mission has. We’re very definitely looking at a person driven by integrity and conviction, someone who can’t be bought or sold, either by common coin or by popular recognition. People like that never give up and they’re nearly impossible to either spot or stop.
“People like that never give up and they’re nearly impossible to either spot or stop.”
Keeping a secret that you know you can’t share with anyone else is a constant background stress. Keeping a very big secret is like having a giant boulder on your shoulders that gets heavier and heavier, grinding you down on a daily basis. It takes a huge toll on your resources but they’ve kept their secret successfully for two years. Believe me, that takes a mental and emotional strength that few people possess.
Looking at the “Background and Context” section of the readme file that came with the latest release, their motivation is plain for all to see, as are a number of other things. They are quite prepared to burn climate science down to its very foundations to stop it being used to justify environmental policies that they believe are killing people in the developing world. It is a motivation and strategy I share with them. My admiration of them is only tempered by my awe at the escalated level of risk they’ve now decided to take on.
A question I’ve always asked myself about the original climategate release and the new one too, is one that as far as I can tell, surprisingly no one else appears to ever have speculated on. I’ve never raised it publically because I feared it might intensify the hunt for them by forces more powerful than anything UEA or Norwich constabulary can bring to bear but as I’m now sure that with their latest release, they’ve taken care of that problem, I’ll share it now.
“These missing emails are the real dynamite at the secret heart of this release of climategate.”
 Yes, they’ve given us all the top-level conspiratorial correspondence between the likes of Jones, Trenberth, Hansen, Mann et al but these are the very people who simply must have been communicating upwards to senior political figures or at least their most trusted advisers. Think about it for a moment, do you seriously think the latter plough their way through huge turgid IPCC reports and then hammer out policy and approach from them? No, of course not. These missing emails are the real dynamite at the secret heart of this release of climategate. We do not have a single one of those high-level political emails but they must of course exist.
I strongly suspect we now have them in our possession.
From the viewpoint of the political establishment, the original climategate was probably viewed as a squabble about the details of a branch of science and it was strictly confined to the blogosphere, since it was never reported on by the mainstream media. It looked like a one-off, so there was no ongoing political liability to worry about. Release 2 changes things, both for the whistleblower and the parties involved in the political emails. I’ve no doubt that at the time of the first release, the “scientists” assured the politicians that no significant political emails had been compromised and after two years of complete silence, it looked to be so.
With release 2, all bets are off. The release of explicit emails between scientists and senior political figures conspiring to deceive the electorate would not only be politically terminal but would also have to be reported on in the mainstream media. There’d be no way of ignoring them. The whistleblower is not going away and this means a real attempt is now going to be made to find them before they release any more emails. The last time, finding them was the last thing anyone wanted. This time, they simply have to be found and fast. Given the greater will and a lot more resources, there’s a real danger they’ll locate the leaker this time.
I don’t do conspiracy theories but have few illusions about what powerful political interests are capable of when they’re threatened, so I’ve no doubt that having located them, a point solution can easily be implemented. It would have to be something suitably grubby to completely destroy the credibility of the leaker. For instance, frame them up for downloading child pornography, try them, jail them and throw away the key. Who’d believe a word from a disgraced scientist sitting in cell because of their disgusting paedophile tendencies? Safely locked away and with absolutely no access to a computer, they’d be nullified. They simply wouldn’t be able to release any more material.
The leaker’s solution to this problem, and I have to say it’s rather neat, is to release all the remaining material now. Release 2 contains the political emails and all it needs is the magic pass phrase to unmask them. It could be uttered at some phony trial on trumped-up charges, it could be uttered to a fellow prisoner, it could be disclosed to their lawyer. It could be left with a few trusted friends with instructions as to who to send it to if anything untoward should happen to them. Allowing for the very worst, it could even be in their last will and testament.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 116 ratings
Gillard — the Australian Prime Minister — got the timing perfectly wrong.
Within two weeks of the Carbon Tax finally becoming Law, it’s becoming hard not to notice that the whole Global Scam is fragmenting. This Carbon ship is on fire, the lifeboats are leaving, the rats are jumping, and the Australian team just turned up with the family jewels. Their policies are “take no prisoners” and “bring no life jackets”. Their exit plan is to have No Exit.
 Sergey Abramov (ship, 1960) ...By Leksey It’s hard to imagine how the timing could have been more quintessentially insane, or their “Leadership of Clean Energy” more poignantly inane.
After subterranean lakes of Shale Gas were discovered two months ago under Lancashire in the UK , even half-tinted-Green governments started stepping backwards from diabolical renewables deals. Nearly everyone popped up and said No No No to Kyoto. “Let’s be frank” said EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, “At best we could only get the EU, Norway and maybe two or three more countries to sign up for a second Kyoto period.” The Bloomberg article about the collapse of the Kyoto agreement discusses 14 nations and two continents, but Australia wasn’t one of them. So much for setting examples for the world.
Meanwhile, renewables are so openly on the nose that even the Duke of Edinburgh not only said windfarms are absolutely useless, but he got away with it. Windfarms are unpopular in Spain, the UK (here and here), Vermont, Scotland, New Zealand, and even the-iconic-home of-windmills the Netherlands. Solyandra sank like a concrete block. Google are pulling out of renewables, then on top all that, the IPCC shocked everyone by admitting they don’t know if the weather will get warmer or cooler for the next thirty years.
And that was just last week.
This week, FOIA popped up and released another 5,000 emails of self-serving scientists behaving badly (and another 200,000 encrypted ones, no password yet, just in case). Ross McKitrick put out a carefully cutting report on how the IPCC needs to be reformed or abandoned. Then another report pops out by Schmittner and co, saying that actually, the worst case scenario is just 1.7 – 2.6 degrees not 4 ,5, 6, or 11 degrees. 
The EU is teetering on financial collapse, and panic selling sees the price of carbon is hitting record lows (€ 7.040 in the EU, and in New Zealand just $9US). The carbon price has dropped by half since June. There is an oversupply of carbon credits and trading houses are asking how low the price can go? UBS is suggesting a price of €3 (A$4). Australians will pay a fixed price of $15 per ton, set by people who keep telling us that a free market is the “best solution”. (If only they knew what a free market was.)
The word carbon is so unpopular that even the Carbon Market and Investors Association changed its name — they think “Climate Market” has a better ring to it (oh boy, do we have news for them).
Poetically, record snow is falling in the Northern Hemisphere (eg in Canada and Russia).
How times are changing
Headlines in The Australian newspaper rather put a fine point on it. The three stories below were all just on Friday; the top story about exaggerating the forecasts was on the front page. For the fans of man-made Global warming who say The Australian is biased in favour of skeptics, I say just wait until The Australian starts reporting the other side of the story for real (they look they might be working up to it). We haven’t seen anything yet. Fans of catastrophic warming prophecies will soon yearn for the days when The Australian only printed the occasional politically-skeptic article among their reprints of unquestioned government propaganda.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 130 ratings
Behind the scenes, I’ve been playing with a new neat tool for hunting hypocrisy, corruption, bias and unprofessional behaviour and I’m pleased to announce its ready to share with the world. The kudos for this all belongs to, as usual, a skilled volunteer. Thanks to EcoGuy for turning his rapid-fire coding ability onto this.
On the EcoWho site he has helpfully placed all of Climategate I and II together into a combined searchable database. It’s fast, easy to scan, it copes with tricky search requests and provides a link to the full email from the results page of the search.
Click on the image or the link above.
Happy Hunting!
Jo
UPDATE: EcoGuy tells me that searches are coming in a stream about one-every-5-seconds. Do tell us what you find!
UPDATE: Ecoguy adds: you can put ‘.*’ between words you are looking for to find them apart but in the same order (i.e. paper.*fraud) – you can do what is called basic Regex matching, so if you know Regex you can really go to town. Putting a space at the beginning and end will just match the word enclosed only.
UPDATE: Ecoguy has just added in the ability to turn on matching by case or to restrict to just matching whole words – should make it easier to find exactly what you are looking for.
9.5 out of 10 based on 67 ratings
Up to £13.7 million in grants have been paid to Professor Phil Jones, from a number of funding bodies including the European Union, NATO, and the US Department of Energy. But the intellectual and philosophical climate is so weak that Jones doesn’t even consider himself to be paid to serve the citizens of those countries. No wonder he feels that people asking for “his” data are nuisances and pests.
Usually in Science-World, scientists don’t have to deal with pesky FOI’s — because they make their data and methods available for free upon request. It should never come down to legal action for citizens to get what is rightfully theirs.
Phil Jones is Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He’s one of the key climate scientists behind the IPCC reports (he and James Hansen of GISS in NASA are the two leading alarmist climate scientists).
Emails released in ClimateGate II that show he deletes emails, rationalizes that he is a not really a public servant, and discusses ways to hide from FOI requests, even as he admits the models are all wrong.
 Prof Phil Jones <4443> Jones in 2004:
“Basic problem is that all models are wrong
– not got enough middle and low level clouds.”
———————————————————————————————–
Phil Jones is in denial that he serves the public
date: Mon Aug 24 14:54:00 2009
from: Phil Jones
subject: Re: transparency
to: Harold Ambler
[[[unsent draft?]]]
Dear Harold,
You have come up with a whole list of motives for my actions, all of which are wrong.
I don’t consider myself a public servant, and I doubt many working in the University sector in the UK would either.
University workers in the UK are not what we call civil servants.
Phil
—————————————————————
Phil Jones tells Mann to hide his data behind the excuse of Intellectual Property Rights
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9.3 out of 10 based on 72 ratings
Five hours ago, FOIA left a link on my blog to a Russian site (I had been away). Emails and comments are streaming through to let me know that the Tallbloke, and Jeff ID have also got them. Tallbloke has opened it and checked for viruses. Jeff ID confirms there are thousands of emails readable and 220,000 more locked behind a password. (H/t Foia (!) Ripper, hunter, RoryFOMR, Janet J,… thanks!)
Assuming (I stress) assuming that these are indeed real, and not an elaborate hoax, wow.
It appears it’s all on again. The sordid details, honest thoughts, and human folly on display. (If true, thank you to Foia.) We need confirmation.
UPDATE #3*** It appears the Guardian is onto this already and Michael Mann is suggesting the emails are real”: “Well, they look like mine but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all”. Hat tip: Tom Nelson
The BBC likewise is reporting this, and confirming it — it appears the emails are from 2009 or earlier, and if that’s the case, it means these were probably held back from the first batch. This will be described as being “rehashed old news”, which committee’s have investigated, blah blah blah, but what it shows is scientifically even more damning than the first batch. All of these people were saying it was “settled” beyond doubt, yet agreeing with the “deniers” behind the scenes about the uncertainties, the failure of the models, their inability to predict clouds, and the tropospheric tropical temperatures (ie the hot spot)…
A NEW LINK TO DOWNLOAD (h/t David).
There are more links at Lubos Motls site
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Some alleged emails — choice picks:
<1939> Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary […]
Jones:
Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low level clouds.
Jones:
I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process
<1473> McGarvie/UEA Director of Faculty Administration:
As we are testing EIR with the other climate audit org request relating to
communications with other academic colleagues, I think that we would weaken
that case if we supplied the information in this case. So I would suggest that
we decline this one (at the very end of the time period)
<1577> Jones:
[FOI, temperature data]
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we
get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US
Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original
station data.
<4085> Jones:
GKSS is just one model and it is a model, so there is no need for it to be
correct.
Wils:
What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably […]
<1485> Mann:
the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the PR battle. That’s what
the site [Real Climate] is about.
Bradley:
I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstruction”.
Cook:
I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly cannot be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead.
Barnett:
[IPCC AR5 models] clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer
<1982> Santer:
there is no individual model that does well in all of the SST and water vapor
tests we’ve applied.
<5111> Pollack:
But it will be very difficult to make the MWP go away in Greenland.
<5096> Cook:
A growing body of evidence clearly shows [2008] that hydroclimatic variability
during the putative MWP (more appropriately and inclusively called the
“Medieval Climate Anomaly” or MCA period) was more regionally extreme (mainly
in terms of the frequency and duration of megadroughts) than anything we have
seen in the 20th century, except perhaps for the Sahel. So in certain ways the
MCA period may have been more climatically extreme than in modern times.
I am updating live. There is a lot more….
9.6 out of 10 based on 159 ratings
Blitzed in the polls, the Australian Labor Party have picked the communist solution — straight from the Soviet rule book of Free Speech. Goskomizdat revived as a kind of Goskoshopfront. It’s more desperate and simplistic band-aid legislation to benefit the ruling class and not the people. Surprisingly, the media seems to be silent on this scandalous attack on free-speech.
The Gillard Government tells us the tax’s effect will be minimal, but they are clearly terrified of the blowback.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has been directed to enforce accurate business promotions with a $1.1m dollar fine, and team of 23 “carbon cops”, to stop Australian businesses from posting any signs telling the public how much extra they are paying due to the Carbon Tax, or having a “Pretax sale”. Imagine the travesty of transparently letting customers see a breakdown of their invoice, or of warning customers of price rises to come?
A simple repeated message like the one below can take on a life of its own. (And we all know what animal the crowd will think of if we say: “Don’t think of an elephant”):
Of course, some will wave this away by explaining that they just want to stop people making incorrect claims. But do the smell test, and see who this legislation is designed to protect. What customer would be hurt by buying goods cheaper pre-tax? What customer suffers if they “think” the price increase they pay is due to the Carbon Tax, when it’s really partly due to the Mining Tax or creeping inflation? The truth is that the only people “hurt” by a mistaken tax increase claim, o-the-tyranny, would be the an unpopular rulers.
If a company mistakenly blames other price rises on a Tax that had a popular mandate, the company would a) be advertising how much it’s prices had increased, and b) be seen as whinging, not caring about “pollution” and not being a team player. If Gillard had done what she promised (that is, wait for a community consensus on the climate) the whole problem of naughty anti-c-tax-business-signage would have been avoided, not least because that consensus would never have happened, but because even if it had, what business would want to look like a sour-puss, complaining about a fair tax that most of the community saw a need for?
Rulings like this one don’t serve the country. It’s an advertisement for rulers interested in their own welfare above that of their citizens.
For those who argue the ACCC is largely toothless, bear in mind, that no company need be fined $1.1million to have a stifling effect. Calculating the exact cost of the Carbon Tax will be near impossible for anyone other than the direct importer or producer (as Willis Eschenbach points out on Watts Up). Further down the chain, people will have to rely on statements from their suppliers (if any are provided). Few companies will want to push their luck. Most will underestimate the costs, or say nothing.
But censorship has ways of having the opposite effect. If companies can’t advertise that customers “buy air conditioners now, because the prices will rise by x% next month” they can still make contact with journalists and bloggers who can remind the public to put their orders in before June 30th. Unfortunately, those journalists may now find it very hard to get named quotes, or press releases that list dollar estimates. Can someone tell me, here in the Socialist States of Australia, whether journalists are still allowed to list “anonymous sources” or publish industry rumours?
There is easy potential for shop-sign and invoicing dissent. Where previously in a land with free speech there might have been dull annoying messages like “Costs up 10% due to the Carbon Tax”, now there is all kinds of potential for creative skullduggery and political sabotage. Watts Up kicked off the call for alternative “permitted” signs. So here are a few on-the-silly-side from me. (Click for full size images).
…
And some bumper stickers or rubber stampers from Speedy:
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9.3 out of 10 based on 63 ratings
Excess winter deaths are more than triple the number killed on the road.
Indur Goklany compares average daily deaths for each month in Australia and New Zealand and shows that in both countries (like in much of the rest of the world) there are more deaths in the cooler months.
While climate change legislation aims to make the world cooler, statistics show that the cooler months consistently have higher mortality.
In the unlikely event that legislation might succeed in reducing global temperatures, based on past statistical records, thousands of extra people may die as a result. In study after study, it’s clear that more people die in the colder months than in the rest of the year. The trend applies even in warm countries like Australia.
 Average daily deaths for each month in Australia (left axis, black numbers) and New Zealand (right axis, grey numbers) over a ten year period.
The statistics indicate that:
- For the 10-year period, 1998-2007, Australia had excess winter deaths of 6,779 per yr out of a total of 131,613 deaths per yr (avg.) This works out to 5.2% of all deaths per yr (on avg).
- For the 10-yr period, 1999-2008, NZ had excess winter deaths of 1,542 per yr out of a total of 27,792 deaths per yr (avg.) This is equivalent to 5.5% of all deaths per yr (on avg).
The excess deaths in winter are roughly more than 4.5 times (Australia) and 3.75 times (New Zealand) the annual road toll.
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8.8 out of 10 based on 51 ratings
RE: Mixed messages on climate ‘vulnerability’. Richard Black, BBC.
AND UPDATED: The Australian reports the leaked IPCC review, AND a radio station just announced it as “IPCC says we don’t know if there is a reason for the carbon tax”. See more below.
———————————-
 ... This is another big tipping point on the slide out of the Great Global Scam. IPCC scientists — facing the travesty of predictions-gone-wrong — are trying to salvage some face, and plant some escape-clause seeds for later. But people are not stupid.
A conveniently leaked IPCC draft is testing the ground. What excuses can they get away with? Hidden underneath some pat lines about how anthropogenic global warming is “likely” to influence… ah cold days and warm days, is the get-out-of-jail clause that’s really a bombshell:
“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”.
Translated: The natural climate forces are stronger than we thought, and we give up, we can’t say whether it will get warmer or colder in the next twenty years.
This multipurpose prediction means that in the future, if it’s colder, they’re right; if it’s warmer, they’re right; and they have it covered for more or less storms, floods, droughts, blizzards and frost too.
And then there’s the perpetual-motion aspect of the threat. Greenhouse gases might not be dominant now (like they’ve been saying for the last 20 years) but they will be, they tell us. They will be! Look out! The storms are coming, we’re all doomed. (Well we definitely absolutely might be.) Got that?
If the century progresses without restraints on greenhouse gas emissions, their impacts will come to dominate, it forecasts:
- “It is very likely that the length, frequency and/or intensity of warm spells, including heat waves, will continue to increase over most land areas…
- “It is likely that the frequency of heavy precipitation or the proportion of total rainfall from heavy falls will increase in the 21st Century over many areas of the globe…
- “Mean tropical cyclone maximum wind speed is likely to increase…
- “There is medium confidence that droughts will intensify in the 21st Century in some seasons and areas…
- “Low-probability high-impact changes associated with the crossing of poorly understood thresholds cannot be excluded, given the transient and complex nature of the climate system.”
Then look for the segue where the scientists and activist-journalists, quietly shift the goal-posts;
It’s impossible to read the draft without coming away with the impression that with or without anthropogenic climate change, extreme weather impacts are going to be felt more and more, simply because there are more and more people on planet Earth – particularly in the swelling “megacities” of the developing world that overwhelmingly lie on the coast or on big rivers close to the coast.
That’s an EXIT clause and it reads like this: We might have been wrong about CO2 causing the disasters, but disasters are still coming. More people are going to die from climate catastrophes because there are lots more people! See, “we were right all along to be concerned about the climate”. (Just not quite right about the cause).
This is a handy excuse. Al Gore tried a segue like this out a couple of years ago — pretending that he was just fine tuning his altruistic saintly concern by saying quietly that CO2 wasn’t as bad as he’d thought but Black Carbon (!) was awful pollution. In other words, he’ll never admit he made a bad call, or has been caught pushing a scam, he’ll just say he was right all along, “carbon is still the issue, it’s just a slightly different form”.
These IPCC scientists are using the same technique: Climate Disasters are still the issue — it’s just a slightly different reason.
Repeat after me: AGW is still bad, skeptics are still wrong, and look over here at this slightly new twist on the predictions of disaster.
(See below for the update)
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9.2 out of 10 based on 142 ratings
RE: “Sceptic: one inclined to doubt accepted opinions” by Michael Bachelard, The Sunday Age
———————————–
 For free, and just because I’m a nice person, I’m going to help Michael Bachelard with his science articles.
He’s a Walkley Award winner writing for the two largest “broadsheet” circulation papers in Australia. He knows indigenous issues, politics and industrial relations, so “climate science” was the … er, obvious next step, right?
The Age (and by default, it’s sister The Sydney Morning Herald) decided to pretend to investigate the most burning climate questions the public could offer. But their investigations apparently amounted to phoning up government agents and fans of the policy, and asking them what to write.
It’s titled: Sceptic: one inclined to doubt accepted opinions, but it could have been titled Journalist: one inclined to parrot groupthink
Poor Bachelard is out of his depth in the science trying to answer Stephen Harper and Harry Hostan’s questions. For an investigative journalist he had odd ideas about how to get answers, almost never contacting the people or groups he wrote about directly. Who knows, maybe the servers at Fairfax don’t allow emails out to non-lefties at the moment, because he doesn’t seem to have contacted anyone who could have helped him get the information right.
PR example number 1: Totally wrong, and with no research!
Forced by a skeptic to notice the massive Petition Project, Bachelard “debunks it” with something that isn’t true. He claims the “institute does not release the full list of names, so it can’t be verified”. But it takes two minutes of searching online to turn up the full list of 31,500 names listed alphabetically, and also arranged by State (it makes that verification easier). Could someone show Bachelard, Bing, Yahoo, or Google?
For further confirmation, I emailed Art Robinson, the man who knows more about the project than anyone, to make sure that all the names were listed and got a reply within hours. Yes, they certainly are.
Dismissing the 9,000 PhDs and 22,000 science graduates, Bachelard offers mindless handwaving: the Petition it seems “has been given credibility by conservative and sceptical commentators”, as if leftie commentators were correct somehow for actively ignoring it. (If only those could think of a good reason why they keep saying “there is a consensus” when clearly there isn’t.) Instead, the Petition got credibility the only way that counts, the hard way, by amassing an enormous list, which includes eminent, highly qualified award winning physicists, as well as professors, doctors, engineers and geologists. Rather than being a two minute web survey, the organizers also published a detailed paper reviewing its highly considered position. It’s been up for years now, if there were fake names, or non-scientists, they would have been exposed.
The list has so much credibility, and is so hard to attack, Bachelard has to resort to saying things are aren’t true and making petty ad hominem attacks on the size of the Institute. The fact that this extraordinary project grew out of one man’s passionate work, starting from his farm, only makes the Petition more authentic. (If it had come from a large institute, presumably Bachelard would have dismissed it because it was well funded, right?)
Make no mistake, scientifically, the petition proves nothing, but politically, it blows the consensus out of the water.
The sloppy journalist misses the real revolution
There has never been an uprising of scientist-whistleblowers like this one, and the petition is just the tip of the iceberg of the revolution online that is changing the way science is being done. Like much of the internet activity, the Petition was done by volunteers, paid for with individual private donations, and all the volunteers and many of the donors are PhD scientists. If Greenpeace could name 9,000 PhD’s on their team it’d be in headlines, across posters, and on bumper stickers too.
PR Example number 2: Invent wacko statements from skeptics
Because lazy journalists think they “know” what skeptics say by only talking to their alarmist buddies, they misrepresent the skeptics. (Note to Bachelard: seriously, if you value your reputation, you can email skeptics, we don’t bite, and we speak English too. We can save you from looking like a sock puppet of a self-interested government agency.)
The basics of greenhouse chemistry are agreed on by most skeptics and the IPCC, it’s a non-point. So it’s a tad embarrassing that Bachelard inadvertantly paints the Prize winning brilliant meteorologist, Richard Lindzen, as a “denier” of basic physics, when Lindzen is strictly in the same camp as the IPCC on this point. Bachelard implies Lindzen alone does not think water vapor “is the most effective agent of global warming”. Ha ha, what a joke. This is high school physics, and shows how far behind the main game Bachelard is. Every tri-atomic molecule like CO2 and H2O is a greenhouse gas (count the atoms: 1,2,3). H2O is 25 – 100 times as abundant as CO2. In his entire five decade career, Richard Lindzen would never have uttered such nonsense. Bachelard wants to paint Lindzen as a loner, extremist, dare I say it — denier?
Bachelard probably excuses himself by thinking he’s helping the planet (the rocks won’t thank you Michael), but these kind of poorly researched PR statements make him just another patsy tool of tricksters, sloppy thinkers, and religious zealots who come to take away honest citizens money for spurious causes.
PR Example number 3: Only show the public what they are “allowed to see” (hide those weather balloons!)
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9.5 out of 10 based on 93 ratings
The ocean acidification threat is a big can of worms. I asked Professor Brice Bosnich to help create a quick reference page on the chemistry and was pleased he could find the time to help. Here’s everything you wanted to know about the basics…
He explains what pH means, and points out that:
- Ocean pH varies by 0.3 naturally.
- Claims of acidification since 1750 are based on dubious models and few observations.
There are reasons to assume that marine life will not be overly affected by an increase in ocean acidity due to atmospheric carbon dioxide:
- Ocean life evolved and survived far higher levels of CO2 for millions of years in the past.
- Marine organisms actively create carbonate shells (using energy) which means crustacea, corals and molluscs aren’t automatically prey to pH changes in the same way that say a limestone rock would be.
- The world’s oceans may have warmed a mere 0.17C since 1955, hardly a significant threat to marine life.
We also find out that acidic water is added to the ocean from rainfall and floods (and he explains why raindrops will always be acidic).
There are more pressing threats. — Jo
———————————————————–
Guest Post by Professor Brice Bosnich
The Chemistry of Ocean pH
BACKGROUND
Pure Water and its pH
The water molecule is comprised of three atoms – two of hydrogen (H) and one of oxygen (O). Each of the hydrogen atoms is linked to the oxygen atom by a chemical bond, and hence the water molecule is symbolized as H2O, see picture below. At 25oC, in the case of a very small number of water molecules, one of the hydrogen atoms breaks off (dissociates), thereby forming equal numbers of two charged species, a negatively charged hydroxide ion (OH–) and a corresponding positively charged hydrogen ion (H+) called a proton. The size of the respective charges is equal to that carried by an electron. Notwithstanding this dissociation, nearly all of the water continues to exist in the form of the water molecule, H2O.
 Pure water is neutral, namely neither acidic nor basic (alkaline). Acidity occurs when there are more protons present than hydroxide ions and conversely, water is basic or alkaline when hydroxide ions are in excess. The concept of pH was first introduced by the Danish chemist, Sorensen, in 1909. He defined it as the relationship;
pH = log10 (1/[H+]) = – log10 [H+] (1)
where [H+] is the (molar)1 concentration of protons. Because the molar concentration (M) of protons in pure water at 25oC is 10-7 M, the pH of water is 7. Thus a pH value less than 7 refers to an acidic solution, whereas a value higher than 7 indicates a basic solution.
Water exposed to air slowly becomes mildly acidic, because atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) dissolves in the water. When dissolved in water CO2 reacts with water to give carbonic acid, H2CO3, as shown by equation (2):
H2O + CO2 ⇌ H2CO3 (2)
As indicated by the two-way arrows (⇌), this chemical reaction is reversible; water and carbon dioxide generates carbonic acid which also breaks up (rather slowly) to regenerate water and carbon dioxide. The equilibrium lies to the left so that there is much more CO2 dissolved in water than H2CO3.
The amount of CO2 that is dissolved in water depends on the temperature of the water, and on the concentration present in the water and the pressure of CO2 in the air above the water. The warmer the water, the less CO2 will dissolve in it. Because cold water will absorb more carbon dioxide, it follows that if water containing dissolved CO2 is warmed it will release CO2 into the air. (Consider the effect when a warm bottle of beer is opened!) The more CO2 that is present in the air above the water, the more CO2 that will dissolve.
Carbonic acid is an acid in water because its hydrogen atoms (H) can dissociate to release protons (H+), equation (3):
H2CO3 ⇌ HCO3– + H+ (3)
The bicarbonate ion, HCO3–, can also dissociate its hydrogen atom to give a proton and the carbonate ion, CO32-. Carbonic acid and the bicarbonate ion are said to be weak acids because, unlike hydrochloric acid in water solution, the hydrogen atom is not fully dissociated. For slightly complicated reasons carbon dioxide dissolved in water will generate; H2CO3, HCO3– and H+. Because of the presence of the proton derived from carbonic acid [equation (3)], water that has been exposed to carbon dioxide in the air will be mildly acidic, about pH = 5.7. Raindrops become acidic for the same reason.
The figure below shows the fraction (alpha) of various species in solution with varying pH. At lower pH more carbonic acid is present (left), at higher pH more carbonate exists (right), at about pH 8.5 the maximum fraction of bicarbonate is present and at this pH it is essentially the only species present.
Sea water acidification
The pH of sea water can be measured2 although there are complications due the presence of dissolved salts and other factors. On average, surface sea water is mildly basic, about pH of 8.1, although the measured pH can vary by as much as 0.3 pH units at different times in the same area and from area to area. There is a mathematical relationship between pressures of CO2 (pCO2) and the resulting pH of pure water3. This relationship is the basis for the calculation of ocean pH values. Caldeira4 employed such a formula to conclude that the pH of the oceans had changed by about 0.15 of a unit since 1750. He assumed, without providing any empirical evidence, that the pre-industrial pH was 8.25. This work has been challenged because it is not consistent with observation3. The ocean is a very complicated system and does not yield to simple modeling.
The effect of pH changes on marine life
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9.6 out of 10 based on 83 ratings
For all those other topics….
6.5 out of 10 based on 8 ratings
 Naomi Klein Photo: Mariusz Kubik Naomi Klein was the wrong person to send to a heavy-weight science conference — in “Capitalism vs Climate” she notices hundreds of details, but they’re all the wrong ones.
Naomi can tell you the colour of the speakers hair, what row they sat in, and the expression on their face — it adds such an authentic flavor to the words, but she’s blind to the details that count. She can explain the atmosphere of the room, but not the atmosphere of the Earth. One of these things matters, and Klein has picked the wrong one.
Her long attack on the Heartland ICCC conference this year is all color and style, and nothing of consequence — the lights are on and no brain is home. Unpack the loquacious pencraft and we wallow in innumerate arguments that confuse cause and effect, peppered with petulant name-calling. She can throw stones, but she can’t count past “one”.
Her aversion to numbers is crippling
Consider how she reduces planetary dynamics to a Yes or No answer. She thinks each skeptical scientist contradicts the next: “Is there no warming, or is there warming but it’s not a problem? And if there is no warming, then what’s all this talk about sunspots causing temperatures to rise?” But oops, Naomi, the numbers matter, numbers like how much warming, and how many years are we talking about.
Is the planet warming? Well, since when, Naomi, since when? You might only be able to answer “Yes”, because that’s the ritual litany you’ve been trained to say, but independent scientists talk about whether it’s cooled in the last 10 years, warmed for the last 300 and changed since William the Conqueror. When it comes to the warming in the last century, is it by 0.7 C or is it really 0.5? This is where the scientists at the Heartland conference were at.
Like a color-blind art critic, it’s as if any number bigger than zero or one went right over her head.
Her thesis sinks quickly to a parody of intellectual wit. Naomi thinks she can understand planetary radiative physics with psychoanalysis. (Essentially she knows she’s right because those who disagree vote the wrong way too).
Those with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. On the other hand, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry and a belief that we all get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.
Unwittingly she’s admitting that she picks her scientific theories according to her political aims.
She makes the child-like assumption that everyone else “thinks” the same flawed way she does
She believes those who disagree with her on the science do it because they vote differently — completely missing the obvious truth that a slab of the population can do what she can’t: that is, think.
She’s got cause and effect completely back to front. It’s not that skeptics pick their political masters, then “follow” the party line — they pick the theory and then find the right party. Klein apparently can’t imagine doing something as radical as looking at the evidence first, then picking the politicians who don’t seem to be barking mad, gullible patsies, fawning to the latest tax-mongering fallacy. It’s frankly a bland non-event that at the moment independent -thinkers lean heavily Republican. Which Democrat can see through the scam?
 Pew Poll: The turning point for Republican voters was in 2008. [Source: http://www.people-press.org/2009/10/22/fewer-americans-see-solid-evidence-of-global-warming/ You only need to look back five years when many Republicans thought CO2 was a problem as well, to see Klein’s pocket-psychoanalysis disprove itself. What changed first, the views of the Republican leaders, or the views of the voters? The answer is the polls shifted long beforethe candidates fell all over themselves to make sure no one thought they were fooled by the climate-scare. Did the Republican world-view radically change in the last five years, or is the Democrat worldview stopping people from admitting they were wrong?
Klein’s denial of reality
Bad manners always say more about the speaker than the target. Klein deceives herself with her name-calling “denier”. She can’t name anything scientific that the so-called deniers deny. Instead she fell for the Richard Muller blatant fakery, where he pretended to be a skeptic, then was so conveniently converted. She’s the one denying that he was always a fan of the IPCC, and always thought CO2 was pollution.
The myth that Big-Oil drives the skeptics is manna for the confused, who can’t fathom why so many people don’t pander to the same messianic saviours that they do. Klein obediently totes out the “$900 billion” the top five oil corporates make in profits, but completely ignores the $10 Trillion market in carbon credits that a global trade could have produced. Again, the numbers are just too complex for her — Exxon and friends might lose 5 or 10% of their bottom line to the monster carbon market, but the carbon market fans lose 100% of their profits if the big scare is exposed as a fake. There’s ten times the money pushing for a carbon market, and Klein blindly acts as a sock puppet for the big financiers.
The scientists speaking at Heartlands Climate Conference were so far ahead of Klein, they might as well have been speaking Urdu.
The logical vacuum sucks
The entire 9600 word tome depends on one sole point: the evidence that doubling CO2 causes major warming, not just 0.5 degrees, but 3.5 degrees. (There are those problematic numbers again). Klein starts from the assumption that the way to know if the third rock from the sun is artificially warming is to parrot government scientists — hailing “Gods” appointed by the politicians. Thus everything she writes, collapses from the start. Science is not about following government appointed prophets, but about the evidence, the measurements, and the observations. The weather balloons, satellites, ocean buoys and ice cores are unanimous — the modelers-of-doom are exaggerating. Klein never goes there. Her religion doesn’t permit it, and she’d have to deal with … numbers.
When Pat Michaels suggested that airconditioners would save people from heat stroke in France, Klein called it “callous”. Why? Apparently people are dying in Africa, in droughts, and Naomi thinks that airconditioners in France are causing it. Somehow it’s reasonable for the French to die of heat-stroke on the off-chance that by switching off the air-con they might create some rain in Johannesburg. Global dumbness is scary. How could reasonable people believe this?
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9 out of 10 based on 190 ratings
Pew Charitable Trusts is an influential “progressive” think-tank with $5 billion in assets. What was the The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has lost the Pew name and funds, and become the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES).
Pew used to supply $3.5 million of the center’s current $4.4 million annual budget. Instead, in complete green purity, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Entergy Corp. will be the principal founding sponsors for the new C2ES.
DeSmog immediately denounced them and declared that all of their pronouncements are automatically biased since they are now oil-funded deniers:
…
Or maybe not. If Shell had sponsored a skeptic, Desmog would have turned it into a high rotation ritual chant.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 58 ratings
And so it came to pass that a small band of the selfish or deluded came to steal the blood, sweat and toil of the many.
They lied, broke solemn promises, failed to provide evidence, and displayed a singular lack of good-manners. They viciously insulted anyone who disagreed, they hid the models the public were forced to pay for, they gave patrons highly paid jobs to advertize their scheme.
They speak arrant nonsense as if it is the bleeding obvious: telling us that we will grow rich if we use energy that costs more; that coal miners are to blame for heavy rain; that more taxes will bring investors; that we’ll lose jobs if we don’t pay more than we need to for energy; or that 6.98 billion people will follow the 0.02 billion who lead us on the path to the Land of Stupid. They made prophesies that failed time after time, yet speak on, as if only they have the vision to guide us.
The polls show the public would not have elected people who wanted to bring in a Carbon Tax. Yet it is law.
The narcissistic self-anointed activists have overreached, and it will be their undoing.
The narcissistic self-anointed activists have overreached, and it will be their undoing.
“We’re copying the EU” except the EU took $1.50 per capita over 5 years, and we’re taking 250 times as much.
The selfish include the parasitic members of the species homo-sapiens — they who produce little of value, but demand the rest provide them with food, housing and rewards. These demands are enacted through the government, under the guise of “helping” to prevent a non-existent threat.
The deluded include many people of good will, who are too busy (working to support the parasitic class) to check that their news sources, schools, and government officials are giving them both sides of the story, or that their search engines are behaving fairly (who would know?).
People can simultaneously belong to both groups. Some of the parasitic class, deceive themselves that they are helping. They take no responsibility for the children who drowned in floods they said would never come. They will never know, nor apologize to those who die prematurely of diseases that could have been cured. They think not of all the invisible jobs that were gone before they were offered, or the factories that moved overseas.
Australians, Bob Brown just knocked on your door and demanded your house pay somewhere from $390 up to $1,000 per person each year (depending on your model) from July 1, 2012, for ever. For this money, you will receive in return a change in the climate too small to measure. If you don’t pay, you will be incarcerated.
You no longer have the opportunity to spend that $1,600 – $4,000 per household each year on things that are more important to you. Money that could have been used to teach our children, or cure diseases, or give clean water to the poor will now be used to employ people to audit, market, and manage schemes that enrich bankers and traders and feed the mafiosi.
If that makes you angry, there is plenty you can do. We don’t have to accept this, but it will take work. All around the world the vacuity and self serving nature of this false alarm is spreading by word of mouth. Photos of thermometers in car-parks, and cartoons or charts of rivers of money, are spreading from intray to intray. The flow of believers becoming skeptics is one way and cumulative, and the tipping point is near when it will be open knowledge that the great CO2 scare amounts to nothing.
You too, can send a letter to the editor of every major newspaper.
Bob Brown wants you too: “Feel like your Government is not listening to your concerns?” he asks… “Then use our letter writing facility “. The Greens helpfully provide us with a page to write to the editors of all the national newspapers. I recommend you use it. Politely.
The financial day of reckoning (think Greece, think the Eurozone) will hasten the process of putting the climate scare in its place.
Labor will live to rue the day it fell for the most blatant of scams.
It will be marked for a generation as the gullible patsies of global financial houses.
Thank the Greens and Julia Gillard for waking up the citizens, for they could have kept growing their power through stealth and calculation, but instead they’ve bet double or nothing on one card which turned out to be The Joker. They are one cutting documentary, or one scathing feature film away from going down in history as the sock-puppets of banksters who thought they could change the weather.
Who is cheering today as the legislation goes through? Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays,…. The Greens are unwittingly acting as agents for large financial institutions who want monster profits from a trading scheme of paper credits in an atmospheric nullity.
(Yes, I too, was once a Green who believed in man-made global warming .)
Last year, $142 billion turned over in global carbon trading markets, and …the climate kept changing.
The Nation can never be compensated.
Send a letter to National Editors and vote in the SMH poll.
But yes, there is hope. Abbott has vowed to repeal it, and most of the rest of the world is abandoning it.
The IPA and Ian Plimer are calling for donations. http://donate.ipa.org.au/
9.4 out of 10 based on 150 ratings
This is about what it adds up too: If the carbon tax costs us, say, $10 billion a year (anyone have a better number?) we not only have to pay that, but we might lose another $20 billion a year as well.
As I’ve said before, you can’t compensate the nation. There is no productivity gain, no win, no efficiency improvement. There is no bigger pie if you have to cook with leather.
Treasury likes to pretend that the rest of the world is “joining” in the carbon schemes, and that by 2016, the US, Canada, Japan, Russia, China and India will have changed their minds and legislated a carbon price.
The Minerals Council of Australia wasn’t convinced that was a good plan, and asked the Centre of International Economics to analyze the Treasury modelling on the carbon price. The Treasury wouldn’t let them. (Who do they think owns the models?) Instead the CEI had to do their own modelling.
They are apparently the first to try to figure out what might happen in Australia if the rest of the world doesn’t leap head-first and suicidally into carbon pricing schemes.
The CIE finds losses that are 6 times greater:
- That while the Treasury says Australians will lose 0.3% of GDP by 2020, the CEI model suggests we’ll lose 2% of GDP by 2020 (per year).
- So Australia will be not just $32 billion poorer* by 2020, but $180 billion poorer (about $20 billion poorer per year.)
- Where the Labor-No-Business-Experience Government says investment will drop by 0.4%, the CIE put it at a 3.4% fall.
The good news just keeps on coming:
Keep reading →
8.9 out of 10 based on 83 ratings
Australia will — bar asteroid impact — get its Carbon Tax on Tuesday.
Otherwise, it’s business as usual in skeptic-world: Wild unheard-of snow started falling early in the US; there’s another story about masses of fossil fuel energy somewhere under Australia, another western nation makes it stark raving clear that it won’t be getting an ETS (Yay for Canada eh), while a different one pulls the pin on solar panel subsidies (Go Britain). The G20 leaders give Julia Gillard the deadly “you are so incredibly brave” speech, and said they aren’t going to follow.
“PM Julia Gillard told by G20: you’re on your own on carbon”
Keep reading →
9 out of 10 based on 65 ratings
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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