Time for a new rigorous Association of Scientists

Below is the O so apt resignation of Steven J. Welcenbach from the American Chemical Society (ACS). In it he describes how the largest scientific society in the world has become a non-scientific activist group bowing to political pressure and ignoring its members objections. Such is his ire and dismay, he is not only pulling his membership but vows to do all he can to make sure ACS does not receive public money. He suggests that many former members will form a new society that rigorously follows the scientific method (hear hear).

It’s time to start talking about that new society. What would we call this international coalition of scientists who demand the highest standards of reasoning, who expect that the society would be there to serve its members, not just serve the aspirations of the committee members, or grant-seeking-associates? What would be written into its constitution? Any large entity is a target for people seeking power or seeking to use science for their own purposes. How do we stop that decay?

Where is this science association that would never dream of uttering an ad hom, or argument from authority, and would never declare that the “debate is over” and grovel before the false prophets of science? Where is the association that would outspokenly condemn any scientist who hides data, makes logical errors, and resorts to name-calling to silence the critics?

Art Robinson wrote about the how the control of the quest for knowledge itself has been usurped from individuals and private industry and taken over by the government. I discussed his excellent article in The Truth Shall Set You Free.

How soon can we start?

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There are signs the wheel is turning.

In the US there are significant moves at the highest levels to limit the carbon related power-grab. (Thanks to SPPI for the heads-up.)

Perhaps this is the point where the 2010 election results start to spoil the grandiose plans that once looked inevitable? Maybe democracy can save the day?

House republicans are trying to stop funding for the EPA “climate control” at the same time as they try to limit the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases.

House GOP spending bill prohibits funding for EPA climate regs

Source: The Hill

By Andrew Restuccia – 02/11/11 07:33 PM ET
A government spending bill unveiled Friday night by House Republicans would prohibit funding for Environmental Protection Agency climate regulations through September of this year.

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Garnaut: spend billions! Why? So they don’t say nasty things about us.

Photo: ABC

Gillard condemns us to the carbon tax plan (commencing 1 July 2012), and the future emissions trading plans (2015), setting Australia up to be the last dumb-patsy-standing as the rest of the world heads the other way and bails out of the carbon facade.

Australia must immediately pour billions into government coffers, and the man who can justify it all is Ross Garnaut.

For all the expense, the effort, and the pain, what reason did Garnaut put forward?

a/ It will reduce world temperatures. (No.)

b/ 20th century temperatures were perfect. (Says who?)

c/ Australia won’t be so “popular”. Correct answer!

That’s right, the prof of economics has studied it all, crunched the numbers, been paid a stack, and it boils down to “tut-tut-tut, nobody will like you if you don’t do what I say”. (Well, actually it is just foreign “intellectuals”that won’t like you — shucks!)

Garnaut the schoolyard prefect is telling us off. From The Australian:

“ Australia risks a backlash from the international community if it fails to make “proportionate” efforts to cut its carbon emissions.”

But wait, it gets worse, we might confuse them too. God forbid:

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“Climate committee” is a government advertising scheme by any other name.

The Government says it wants a “climate expert” to sell the message to the public, and who do they pick? A small mammal expert whose predictions on the climate are so wrong any normal person would slink off in shame. But not Flannery, the Teflon prophet, reality doesn’t stick to him. How can it be that the outrageously wrong get away with it with reputations intact (and get rewarded too)? Blame the mainstream media. Blame also a government that thinks it’s a good use of public money to promote known failures.

Flannery will be paid $180,000 a year to be part-time chairman of the Gillard Government’s Climate Commission, to convince us to agree to her plans to “put a price on carbon”. In other words, he’s not an expert in climate science but in science-PR. Bolt describes how Flannery changes his PR tune to suit his employers. The man has no scruples.

He claims the “committee is independent”. But we all know that they will come to no other conclusion that to support a tax, call carbon “pollution”, and rave about all the evidence (that they can’t name specifically). That $5.6 million dollar committee is just a thinly disguised $5.6 million dollar advertising campaign.

Despite the reality of floods when he predicted droughts, of 3mm sea level rises when he predicted a meter a year, Flannery is not going to admit he was wrong, or that he helped waste taxpayer funds. Nor that his promotion of a culture of endless drought may have influenced the managers of a certain dam to store water even as deadly flood water collected around them. People blame skeptics already for hypothetical deaths that may come, but bad science is already killing people.

What’s the point of this committee?

It’s sure isn’t science: the “new climate change commission which has been set up to build community support for a carbon price”. The committee is nakedly about promotion of a government agenda. They didn’t even bother to hide it.

“We don’t take advice from the Minister. Our role, really, is just to get a little bit more clarity and understanding in the public around these big issues.

“We’re going to have make a decision around this and everyone will be better served by getting a better understanding around the science.”

A “decision”? Not about “to tax or not to tax” but about “to do a town hall speech” or to do another “televised prime time advert” in the form of a press conference.

When the outcome of a committee is a preconceived conclusion, the point of it is clearly propaganda.

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The Urban Heat Island effect: Could Africa be more affected than the US?

The mystery: We know when we drive through a city that temperatures warm from the fringe to the middle. We know UHI is real, but how much does it affect the official records? Is a 2010 city 0.3 K hotter than a 1960 city? How would we know?

Frank Lansner has come up with a way that might approximate the UHI effect — very roughly. It’s well known that UHI gets bigger as cities grow, but the devil is in the detail. Frank argues that it’s not just the size of the city that matters, but it’s growth rate.

The USA is full of large cities, but there is not much difference between the trend in satellites and ground stations there. Frank’s approach could explain this — most of the growth in human population has come in regions like Africa, not the USA.

He figured that if we compare satellite records to ground stations and see if there is a divergence, we might be able to see an indicator of UHI. The info coming out of satellites ought not be affected as populations expand, but the ground stations are often near population centres and they gradually get surrounded with more square-kilometers of concrete and a bigger buffer of UHI. Hence Frank sectioned up the world, and looked at the trends from both sets of measurements.

None of this is simple as Frank points out. Populations don’t just grow evenly across regions, nor does each 10% increase in population translate into the same increase in industrial output (and presumably heat). Indeed Frank finds the trend changes in different regions of the world. What ever the reason, then the significant result of Frank’s analysis is that the ground based temperature stations contain, on average, nearly half a full degree (0.46 K) of extra heat trend 1979-2010 when compared to the satellite based data, and it occurs in exactly in the areas of the world with highest population growth rates: The developing countries.

A 0.46K difference (for Africa, Latin America, and Asia minus Russia) is pretty darn significant especially as it’s only over 30 years. Is that UHI?

Why do ground based temperatures rise so much faster than satellite data in areas of the largest population growth? UHI? Coincidence? Or some natural effect? (And why isn’t a PhD student, or paid researcher doing these analyses?)

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Questions real journalists ought to be asking about Yasi

When “experts” say that cyclones and extreme storms will be more common in a warmer world, and are “linked”, “connected”, “expected”, or “definitely” due to man-made CO2 emissions, journalists could try asking some real questions.

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1. If storms are getting worse thanks to man-made CO2 emissions, why has there been no increase globally as man-made CO2 emissions rose over the last 40 years?

Last 4-decades of Global Tropical Storm and Hurricane frequency -- 12-month running sums. The top time series is the number of TCs that reach at least tropical storm strength (maximum lifetime wind speed exceeds 34-knots). The bottom time series is the number of hurricane strength (64-knots+) TCs..

Source: Global Tropical Cyclone Activity Dr. Ryan N. Maue

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2. So if you admit the global trend doesn’t change, but suggest that the local or regional trends will change, which parts of the world will get fewer cyclones?

If global averages are still “average”, things have to get better somewhere else right?

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3. So if climate simulations project that Queensland will experience more cyclones, and be one of the areas that get worse, but the Crompton and McAneney (2008) paper shows that in that region the number of cyclones has been falling.

(Follow up: So the global trend is the same, and the regional trend in Queensland is falling, yet we should expect that “it will get worse”?)

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The SOI still rules

Who would have thought that if you knew the air pressure in Darwin and Tahiti in June, you could figure out that the start of 2011 might be a Stalingrad Winter up North and a cooler wetter summer down south (Not that people in Sydney feel all that cool right now). But the air pressure ratios are reported as the SOI (Southern Oscillation Index) and it’s the handiest thing if you like predicting global temperatures 7 months ahead. Look at that correlation.

Since June last year Bryan Leyland has been using the simple connection described by Carter, De Freitas, and McLean in 2009 to predict up and coming temperatures.

So far, for what it’s worth, he’s right on track.

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Such is the power of the stored pool of cold that is the bottom three-quarters of the Pacific Ocean. And when you look at how vast the Southern Pacific ocean is, is it any wonder it has such an influence? All that heat capacity…

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The money is leaving the room

There is still billions invested in research, billions circling in carbon markets, and billions tossed as government subsidies. But there are a few less billion available now than there was before Christmas. Reality bites and Green Energy is left to face the music.

Austerity pulling plug on Europe’s green subsidies

by ERIC REGULY , Globe and Mail

The Spanish and Germans are doing it. So are the French. The British might have to do it. Austerity-whacked Europe is rolling back subsidies for renewable energy as economic sanity makes a tentative comeback. Green energy is becoming unaffordable and may cost as many jobs as it creates. But the real victims are the investors who bought into the dream of endless, clean energy financed by the taxpayer. They forgot that governments often change their minds.

When the Spanish economy went into the toilet in 2008 and 2009, austerity measures were put into place. At first, it appeared the solar industry would be spared the worst of the cutbacks. That changed a bit, but only a bit, in November, when a royal decree reduced tariffs by up to 45 per cent on new PV plants; existing plants would remain untouched. Then – whammo! – a new royal decree landed with a thud just before Christmas. While it didn’t change the tariff, it retroactively limited the number of production hours that PV plants could qualify for the subsidies.

Spain’s solar industry lobby group, the Asociacion Empresarial Fotovoltaica, estimated that the second decree would effectively reduce tariffs received by PV plants by 30 per cent, forcing many of the PV companies to default on their debt. Infrastructure Investor magazine called the second decree “the Christmas Eve massacre.”

Shucks. Lets not forget that this is the same attractive tariff that encouraged producers to generate solar powered electricity around the clock — even at night time. Those tricky solar cells were not so much photo-voltaic as diesel-voltaic. The “market” valued solar power so highly that it paid to use diesel generators to produce “solar power”.

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Climate sceptics and scientists attempt peace deal? As if.

Photo: Guardian

Fred Pearce from New Scientist thinks that there was a real meeting between climate skeptics and “scientists” last week in Lisbon, but therein lies the problem right from the start. The climate skeptics are the scientists, and in the end, hardly anyone else turned up. The unskeptical “scientists” who lose data, hide results, and break laws of reason, not surprisingly, ran a mile from a face to face meeting with the likes of Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Steve Mosher, Georgia Tech’s Judy Curry and Peter Webster. Gavin Schmidt is not stupid, he knows he can’t win, and that there is no middle ground. He has little to gain from attending a meeting like the one held in Lisbon Portugal last week.

The meeting was the brainchild of University of Oxford science philosopher Jerry Ravetz, an 81-year-old Greenpeace member who fears Al Gore may have done as much damage to environmentalism as Joseph Stalin did to socialism. Post-Climategate, he found climate science characterised by “a poisoned atmosphere” in which “each side accuses the other of being corrupt”. Mainstream researchers were labelled “ideologues on the gravy train”, while sceptics were denigrated as “prostitutes and cranks”.

As I keep saying, Climategate is a virus that will not go away. It shocked environmental journalists, earned them dark looks from editors and everyone else in the office, and now we see that a greenpeace member obviously didn’t find all the whitewash committee declarations convincing. But note how far we have come, what a turnaround for Pearce — here’s a former petty-name-caller, now calling skeptics, “skeptics” instead of the usual insult and suggesting they were denigrated. Not long back, he was one of the ones leading the denigrating. Did he think no one would notice?

Here’s Pearce — mid 2008:

In any case, we can expect the deniers to make the most of this opportunity to pour cold water on the whole climate change narrative.

And back then we can see “Pearce-the-journo” knew more about the climate than say, Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT. It was all so simple eh?

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Yasi was a monster — but not an unusual one

Yasi — the super cyclone that isn’t so unusual

Random shot of some coral bits on a beach.

For all the other Christine Milne’s out there, who think coal mining causes cyclones, the empirical evidence inconveniently declares that super-cyclones have been hitting Queensland regularly for the last 5000 years.

As usual, it’s the name-callers who cling to 100 year time-frames and deny the long term evidence, while we “cherry-picking denialists” gravitate towards long term studies based on real observations. (The evidence lies in an obscure industry newsletter called Nature.) The way researcher, Jon Nott, describes it, things have been unusually quiet in our high CO2 world for the last few decades, but cyclones used to be a lot worse, and “worse” is coming back.

Thanks to The Australian for putting together a very timely piece about the historical pattern of cyclone activity.

[Johnathon] Nott is an expert on the incidence of super cyclones. By analysing ridges of broken coral pushed ashore by storm surges, he has catalogued the incidence of super-cyclones over the past 5000 years.

In a paper published in the scientific journal, Nature in 2001 his research shows the frequency of super-cyclones is an order of magnitude higher than previously thought.

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Yasi 2011 — Cyclonic force of nature

File this under shock and awe. Send best wishes to North Queensland.

Cyclone Yasi is now Category 4 Category 5, with windspeeds of 270 295 km per hour (185 miles/hr).

UPDATE #2: Yes, thousands are evacuating, or moving to higher ground. Extra flights and trains are taking people out. Hospital patients are being moved. People are boarding and taping up windows. Whole suburbs in danger of inundation are being evacuated. It’s about 12 hours to go.

Infra red imaging of North Queensland and Yasi

I do a double take each time I see just how far Yasi reaches.

It reminds us of our relative power. It’s 3000 km (1620 nautical miles) from Melbourne to Cape York (roughly the most southerly point on continental Australia to the most northerly) . The full spread of the cloud formations connected to Yasi is a similar scale.

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The oceans, clouds and cosmic rays drive the climate, not CO2

Dr Noor van Andel

Dr Noor van Andel

Dr Noor van Andel spoke at the Dutch Meteorological Institute (KNMI), provocatively concluding there is no observational evidence for the influence of CO2 on past or present climate. He has released a high caliber slide set. He is the former head of research at Akzo Nobel.

In the very long run, we need not mind about CO2 or global warming, but instead about higher [galactic cosmic ray] activity and global cooling. There is no way we can influence [galactic cosmic ray] activity, originating in active black holes and imploding supernovae.

Essentially he uses empirical evidence to draw the conclusion that most recent climate variability is due to Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and to Cosmic Ray effect as described by Svensmark. This fits with what William Kinninmonth explained and I described as essentially a massive pool of “stored cold” in the abyssal depths of the oceans, which erratically reaches up and pulls in heat from the insubstantial atmosphere above. Air temperatures are at the beck and call of the releases of this “cold” (yes I know cold is just an absence of heat). In El Nino years when the cold pool lies deep and unstirred, the incoming solar heat builds up on the surface.

With the oceans covering 70% of the planet and the clouds covering over 60% of the sky, water in its various forms, dominates our climate. Solar magnetic effects correlate with changes in clouds. This graph below shows the rise and fall over the last 1000 years. Both the Medieval Warm Period and the The Little Ice Age (upper graph) match the highs and lows of Galactic Cosmic rays (lower graph).

Originally from Jasper Kirkby’s paper – see page 3. http://aps.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0804/0804.1938v1.pdf

Cloud cover has reduced by 4% since 1984. This would account for a significant part of the warming since then. Less incoming sunlight gets blocked and reflected out to space.

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Vietnamese Translation

Pat Kelly has produced the fifteenth translation of The Skeptics Handbook — Cẩm Nang Của Người Hoài Nghi. Click on the cover to download a copy. The diacritical feast of glyphs in the file title looks like glorious unix nightmare. (So if the link doesn’t work for you, use the back up file here).

Cẩm Nang Của Người Hoài Nghi

Vietnamese Translation -- Cẩm Nang Của Người Hoài Nghi

Pat writes:

Main thanks to my long suffering wife Thi Kelly who has been most painstaking in her efforts.

Also thanks to Cam Ngo MSc MEngSc PhD (UNSW) who reviewed the text and offered helpful suggestions.

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Hackers throw EU carbon market into intensive care ward. May be shut for weeks.

The EU carbon market is in trouble again. Shucks. Who would have guessed?

Hackers have created so much disarray the EU market has been shut down.

(Reuters) – The European Commission has frozen spot carbon trade in its 72 billion euro ($97.1 billion) emissions trading scheme after carbon permits were allegedly stolen. [Reuters]

A market based on an unmeasurable entity — an atmospheric nullity that-might-have-been-worse — was asking for trouble. It’s not that the market has loopholes, it is a loophole. Offering an infinite array of ways to cheat, guarantees the crooks will come. “Lead us Not into Temptation” ought to start with managing the temptations. Carbon is not a commodity, it’s not a free market, and so sooner or later it will come undone. (That said, dumb ideas have lasted for decades). We might get lucky this time.

As I’ve said before, if the bulk carrier turns up empty, the buyer notices the coal is missing. But if the scammers sell empty carbon credits, who can tell? The two top auditors were suspended, prices have been falling and people leaving for better opportunities, some shifty Hungarians sold credits twice (and were allegedly not the only ones to do so), some UK naughties used it to avoid paying the VAT tax, as well as a string of other offenses.

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Freak January 2011 continues — cyclone coming our way

FINAL UPDATE: The far southwest cyclone is just… drizzle. Best wishes for the Queenslanders who are dealing with the real thing right now.

UPDATE#3: Sunday morning –The Cyclone is now Category 1, and wind speeds only 100km/hr and falling, so the BOM have turned off the CYCLONE Alert, and now call it a “Low”. Their map suggests whatever’s left will have a direct hit on perth, but the infra red image suggests it’s already gone past… and will just clip the lower corner of the state. Looks like it will just be a stormy day.

UPDATE #2: Saturday night —This glorious NASA image shows Bianca a few days ago. Right now the cyclone is losing strength over the cooler water as it heads towards the West Australian Southern coast. Windspeeds have dropped from 185km/hr to 140km/hr. But I thought the intricate detail in this photo was magnificent.

Cyclone Bianca tracks towards SW Western Australia. (Click on the image to go to the BOM page to watch the hourly updates of satelite images.)

Cyclone Bianca off the North West Cape 27 – Jan – 2011
Image: NASA, Modis 1 pixel = 1 km.

With wild blizzards in the Northern Hemisphere, and mass floods across the whole Eastern seaboard of Australia, it’s good that Perth is not being entirely abandoned by freak forces of nature. We were starting to feel left out.

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Dellers is on fire today

James Delingpole hits the spot. Rarely do you see someone reply to a petty put-down with such equanimity, clarity, and ultimately, a devastating trump.

If Ben Goldacre thinks I’m a ***** what does that make him?

The BBC spent 3 hours trying to catch Delingpole out so they could paint him a fool. Obviously he didn’t give them much to work with, but it was enough to bring out the attack dogs.

Delingpole pointed out the moral and intellectual cowardice of those who throw teenage insults.

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On blogging

With Jeff ID sadly shutting down the Air Vent, it’s worth a comment on comments, on blogging, and on the strange lifestyle that this is. But given that it’s 11:22pm 12:35pm here, and my office is still full of packed boxes (thanks to the marvellous newly laid wooden floor) tonight is not the time to try to eruditely capture the conditio sine qua non of blogging.

Instead I’ll say I completely understand why Jeff wants some time out (indefinitely). There must be a way to maintain a blog without it taking over all the spare moments in a day, and I’m going to find it, though the compass on my desk is just pointing at the magnet in my hard drive, and there is no GPS in the house.

Thanks for the patience of all the regulars out there who are turning up this month to find an erratic rhythm.

It’s a case of positive feedback

Due to the immediate feedback nature of comments and emails, once a post goes up, it’s easy to… keep posting, in the sense that ideas flow, questions that desperately need answering turn up, things that need debunking arise, and people send in good ideas of their own. It’s hard to draw the line, “more feeds on more” and it’s easy to try to follow the threads… (if only there were 124 hours in a day). Hence it gravitates towards an all-in/all-out mentality.

There is also that pressure that 3,000 people will be popping in, and there’s no new post to show, and plus, blogs become their own community, and who wants to let good people down?

Not to mention that there is a wall of pompous, self-inflated ego’s who keep offering up clay pigeons that are not just easy targets, but spontaneously implode in a light breeze. Special thank yous to Clive Hamilton, Stefan Lewandowsky, Bob Ward, Robin Williams… and the folks at 10:10. Where would I be without them?

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8.2 out of 10 based on 5 ratings

The BBC left leaning bias — it’s in their DNA

This is a a BBC insider abandoning ship. It’s a spectacular case study in why big government can bollocks up any noble proposition, or honest profession. It’s how leadership dissolves into uninspired management as people spend other people’s money. How teams of people who no longer believe, all go through the motions. There’s no competition for the best scoop, for mass ratings, for ideas that push the bounds. The bounds are fixed. Sissons speaks his mind without holding back. — JN

Left-wing bias? It’s written through the BBC’s very DNA, says Peter Sissons

Edited snippets of the Daily Mail’s extract of Peter Sissons new book .

For 20 years I was a front man at the BBC, anchoring news and current affairs programmes, so I reckon nobody is better placed than me to answer the question that nags at many of its viewers — is the BBC biased?

In my view, ‘bias’ is too blunt a word to describe the subtleties of the pervading culture. The better word is a ‘mindset’. At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left.

I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ‘it’s all in there’.

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Chomsky’s prize hyperbole: GOP win could kill us all

It’s another sign of the ongoing implosion among the carbonistas: the nutter comments come out as reality hits their big dream.

Noam Chomsky — linguistics professor, proves that a professorship doesn’t stop you saying silly things, and manages to spin a “vote for the conservatives” as a ticket to destroy the human race. I mean, how do you raise the stakes (of the spin) from here? What tops that? Perhaps by 2012 we will hear how those wrong votes could be taking out not just homo sapiens and polar bears, but all life on Earth?

As election campaign slogans go I don’t think it will catch on: “Vote for us or everyone dies”…

The dumb-punter-voters are too stupid to make good decisions. Democracy has failed. “Chomsky” ought to choose our leaders. Of course.

Thus the Anointed speaks.

— JN

From Climate Depot and Marc Morano

Noam Chomsky: GOP election amounts to ‘death knell for the human species’

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Science is played by politicians

Brisbane floods, 1893. Young boys take the opportunity to play in the floodwaters in the business heart of Brisbane. Other people use rowboats- the only sure mode of transport during the floods. Poul C. Poulsen.

When an expert on small mammals announces that sea levels will rise by 100m, that’s national news. When an expert on hydrology announces that thousands of homes will be flooded sooner or later in a major capital city, it’s buried, and stays buried for four years, and even after it’s leaked, it still isn’t front page news until after the flood.

The photo above reminds us that the hydrology experts were not predicting anything unprecedented.

As usual, pronouncements from science are just the hammer used (or locked away) by those in power for their own purposes. A convenient tool.
From Hedley Thomas at The Australian

The levels of inundation experienced throughout Brisbane as a result of this month’s flood show that the June 1999 Brisbane River Flood Study, which caused a political crisis for Mr Quinn when it was leaked and published in June 2003, correctly warned that the development control lines, set in 1984, were incorrect.

The June 1999 Brisbane River Flood Study is a detailed report setting out the findings of hydrologists and engineers commissioned by the council. The experts whose findings and knowledge contributed to the Brisbane River Flood Study included top engineers from a large firm, Sinclair Knight Merz, and an eminent hydrologist, Russell Mein.

The report’s findings … meant that many properties that were thought to be above the one-in-100-year flood level would, in fact, be one to two metres beneath it.

Where were all the compassionate, concerned activists who were declaring that we ought to listen to the experts? They were too busy campaigning to stop houses being built near the coast for fear of the 3mm annual rise.

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