JoNova

Got baseless smears and innuendo? Perfect for the ABC.

Kellie Tranter attacks imaginary deniers who she doesn’t name, cite, or reference. All her inferences and innuendo are backed up by assertive confidence, a pile of convenient guesses, and nothing else. Everything she accuses the Deniers of is something that those on the Big Scare Campaign do–and if the Deniers do it at all, those who sell-the-scare do it 100 times more.

Shouldn’t we be suing the guys who lost the data we paid for?

And countermanding her legal speculation: sanctions for those who provide inaccurate or misleading information are surely more appropriate for the workers who are paid by the citizens to give balanced and careful reporting — rather than those who offer a product for voluntary purchase in the private market.

The citizens are, after all, forced to pay for the services of the Department of Climate Change, the CRU, the CSIRO, BOM and ABC. No citizen is forced to buy Heaven and Earth. The official organisations are chartered to provide the whole truth, not just their favorite parts. Who in their right mind expects a single speech or book from a private individual to encompass the entirety of scientific knowledge?

Last time I looked, there were no laws saying non-fiction items must be impartial and unbiased.

The Brown-washing article was incorrect, inaccurate, based on fallacies of ad hominem, reasoned by mere authority, and was stocked with countless unsubstantiated claims about imaginary malfeasant authors. It’s so vacant, and lacking in any reasonable argument that it doesn’t just reflect not-too-well on the author, it begs us to ask why our tax dollars are being used to propagate this kind of abject literary and logical failure.

I’m not calling for anyone to be silenced, it’s just a question of value for money.Why did the editors of ABC Unleashed think a generic unresearched smear was worth publishing?

It’s the sheer lack of research that marks this as mindless

Tranter addresses her imaginary unnamed denier, imagining how rich they must be becoming:

Now suppose you’re a “brown washer” and you put yourself up as an expert on the issue of climate change. You knock up a book on the subject. You’re paid to deliver lectures, and you’re using the lectures to promote your profession or trade as an author. Hundreds attend and many purchase your book because they are relatively unsophisticated in scientific matters and want to know more. You’re in “trade or commerce”.

But as I noted in Climate Money, the money for those with lectures, books, junkets and committees vastly outdoes the rewards of skepticism by 3500 : 1. It’s not just a vague ad hom by Tranter, its so wrong, it springs back to hit those she defends who write the manifestos of doom instead. Al Gore is making millions from things proven in court to be wrong, and Tranter seems to think that’s ok.

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6.4 out of 10 based on 5 ratings

Czech translation of the Unskeptical Guide to the Skeptics Handbook

The Scientific Guide to the Skeptics Handbook (Czech translation)

The Guide to the unSkeptical Guide to the Skeptics Handbook (Czech translation)

…

Who would have thought?

SkepticalScience.com has a Czech translation of their attempt to debunk the Skeptics Handbook. And so, as the wheel turns, we have a Czech translation of my debunking of that debunking:

My most sincere thanks to Mirek Pavlicek.

He’s a fast man!

The original English version:

The Guide to the Unskeptical Guide to the Skeptics Handbook.

And I’ve done up an PDF version of the original English language debunking for those who want to have a printed copy to sit side by side.

I would not have guessed the Czechs would beat me to it.

7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Suing the skeptics

Guest post by Anthony Cox on the legal side and on ABC bias

Anthony Cox and David Stockwell sent the letter below to the ABC in response to the article Climate change ‘brown wash’. They wrote:

“Dear sir, On the 27^th July I sent you this e-mail:

“Dear sir,

On the 26^th July, on Unleashed, an article by Kellie Tranter was published;

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2962929.htm

Since the article was very critical of the sceptical approach to anthropogenic global warming [AGW] it would be reasonable for a sceptical view to be published in response, especially in this election period. Accordingly I have attached a response entitled “suing the Sceptics” which was the theme of Ms Tranter’s piece. Details of the authors of the submitted article are here:

Anthony Cox, lawyer and secretary of The Climate Sceptics.

Dr David Stockwell, environmental scientist.

Regards

Anthony Cox”

I have yet to receive a response from you. The article, with some small typo corrections, is again attached. I can only repeat that, since Ms Tranter’s article was critical of the sceptics’ position, a reply is justified in the name of balance which is part of your Charter. Could you please acknowledge this e-mail and whether you intend to allow a response to the Tranter article.
Regards,
Anthony Cox Secretary, The Climate Sceptics.”

[Note from Jo – I’ve added the subheaders below, and a couple of comments […] inline. ]

Suing the Skeptics

In her ABC Unleashed article Kellie Tranter recommends litigation under the Trade Practices Act (TPA) and its state equivalents against sceptics. This is a novel suggestion. Generally litigation under Part V of the TPA requires two things: firstly the creation of a perception of expertise, and secondly, the use of that perception of expertise to promote a product which people rely on to their detriment because it is defective. The novelty here is that it is the believers in anthropogenic global warming (AGW) who are promoting the product not the sceptics. And it is the general public who are being forced through their power bills and the cascade throughout the economy of the cost of the AGW ‘measures’ to rely on the product of AGW to their detriment.

Civil or criminal?

Still, we should be thankful for small mercies. Other AGW believers want to by-pass the civil litigation and take a more summary approach to sceptics. Prominent AGW believers like James Hansen, Joe Romm, Al Gore and Paul Krugman want sceptics to be charged with criminal offences including but not limited to “treason against the planet”. Other AGW believers like Clive Hamilton want the democratic process to be suspended while erstwhile Senate candidate, Lee Rhiannon runs workshops training people in how to break the law and be civilly disobedient. Robert Manne just wants us all to do what the clever AGW scientists tell us to do.

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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Our Climate! THE iPhone App for climate realists

UPDATED! It’s rocketing up the rankings 🙂

NEWS: Can you believe there are 570 Apps in the Canadian weather apps list! No neither can I.

But Our Climate has made it to number one 🙂

“The Our Climate App will prove to be an enduring tool for all open-minded individuals who yearn for the uncensored truth about the Earth’s weather-climate system.

Enjoy!”

Dr Willie Soon
Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics

Our Climate

Behind the scenes a veritable who’s-who of the skeptical world has been working away on yet another way to reach people, especially young people.

For those of you with iphones, if you want the latest graphs, blog information, or answers to questions at the pub debate, there is an option from the iphone store with dozens of excellent articles of the right size, lots of pictures, graphs, quizes, world-wide polls, and more.

The skeptics community grows stronger through projects like this. Kudos to Lubos, and Willie Soon especially, as well as Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, Fred Singer, Henrik Svensmark, Will Happer, Bob Carter, Craig Idso, Paul Reiter but also folks such as yours truly, Lord Christopher Monckton, and Anthony Watts.

The big credit goes to Paul at Aeris Systems in Perth — it’s been his baby and untold hours of work over more than 6 months.

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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

Australian warming trend adjusted UP by 40%

...

Ken has been a very busy man. Another soul in the dedicated army of volunteer auditors. He’s been going through the entire Australian High Quality Data Set as supplied by the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). He’s been assisted by two readers from this site — Lance and Janama — and we’ll be looking to increase the team (see below).

In the State of the Climate report, both the BOM and CSIRO told us that “since 1960 the mean temperature in Australia has increased by about 0.7 °C. The long term trend in temperature is clear… ” but as usual, what they didn’t say was that the raw data since 1910 (not just from 1960) increased only 0.6°C.

The BOM claim their adjustments are random and neutral. Yet when Ken looked at the raw data from Australia’s 100 high quality rural sites, the adjustments increased the trend in the raw data by 40% — from a 0.6°C rise over 100 years, to 0.85°C over 100 years.

In an email to Ken, Dr David Jones, Head of Climate Monitoring and Prediction, National Climate Centre, Bureau of Meteorology, made a clear claim that the adjustments had no real effect:

“On the issue of adjustments you find that these have a near zero impact on the all Australian temperature because these tend to be equally positive and negative across the network (as would be expected given they are adjustments for random station changes).”

Once again, the adjusted data shows a temperature change of 0.25°C.

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7.8 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

Hurricanes, storms take holiday too

Will a hotter world lead to more intense storms?

2010 might be on track to be the warmest ever (according to GISS), but right now, we may be about to set a new record of tropical storms — in inactivity. Ryan Maue tracks the global accumulated activity and reports that by the end of July we might break the record low we set last year.

Ryan N. Maue’s 2010 Global Tropical Cyclone Activity Update

July 15: If no additional ACE occurred in July, the 24-month global ACE total would be 1095 compared to last month at 1173. The previous 30-year low was 1091 set recently in September 2009. No lower values exist during the past 30-years.

Global and Northern Hemsiphere Tropical Cyclone Activity is near a record low

Looking at the National Hurricane Centre, it doesn’t seem like there is much activity on the way between now and the end of July.

Advisories issued for the North Atlantic, The East Pacific, The West Pacific, and the Indian Ocean are all the same:

There is no tropical storm activity for this region.

4.6 out of 10 based on 5 ratings

The Green exodus from the Big Scare

Video available on the CFACT site.

Another Green soul declares enough is enough. It’s a question of conscience.

Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt is a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa (as green as they come), and has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement. He runs a radio show, and speaks with many activists and NGO’s around the world. He claims that the “activists in the developing world, who need to directly defend their own neighborhoods, they understand that this global warming thing is an invention.”

Climate Depot has released a video of Dr. Rancourt: Man-made global warming is nothing more than a “corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else” .

“I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized,” Rancourt said.

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass,” he stated.

Rancourt is scathing of universities (and rightly so):

“They are all virtually all service intellectuals. They will not truly critique, in a way that could threaten the power interests that keep them in their jobs. The tenure track is just a process to make docile and obedient intellectuals that will then train other intellectuals,” Rancourt said.

“You have this army of university scientists and they have to pretend like they are doing important research without ever criticizing the powerful interests in a real way. So what do they look for, they look for elusive sanitized things like acid rain, global warming,” he added. This entire process “helps to neutralize any kind of dissent,” according to Rancourt.

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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

Cap N trade? The zombie bill may not be dead

There are many ways to play the game, and many loopholes to push. Unfortunately there are all too many players who are willing to step outside the spirit of what Democracy is supposed to be about. The lame-duck session is a loophole. This is well written, though focuses only on the government-grab-for-tax, and not on the banker-benefits of trading…– Jo

Foxnews: Senate Energy Debate is Still all About Cap-and-Trade

Phil Kerpen
A headline on Thursday screamed: “Democrats pull plug on climate bill.” Don’t believe it. It’s a diversionary tactic.

The Obama administration and Democratic congressional leadership, seeing their window for shoving the country to the hard left closing quickly, are intent on making one last major push for cap-and-trade. It starts with their “spill-response bill” or “energy bill,” but it’s really about cap-and-trade.

The irony is that the political genius of cap-and-trade was supposed to be that it hides a tax hike from the American people.

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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Gillards non-plan for the Climate

UPDATE: The more I think about this, the more sinister it seems. Gillard won’t put the policy on the table for all of us to debate, but she’ll get a quasi-mandate for an ETS by proxy. She’s playing both sides of the field. The Greens will assume the “citizens committee” will be convinced, they’ll be angry at the delay, but vote for the ALP anyway, the mainstream voter thinks they can relax and worry about it later. The skeptics know that any committee can be whitewashed or biased, and Gillard has pretty much said an ETS is inevitable. Michael Cejnar in #7 is exactly right (read his comment).

What’s a politician to do to convince the masses? They’ve tried the panel of 2,500 so-called experts at the UN who spend five years writing 3,000 page reports. They’ve tried spending millions on advertising campaigns, prize winning documentaries, coloring in competitions in schools, and they’ve tried bullying, name-calling and endless rounds of repetition.

Now instead of convincing the masses, they’ll just “convince” 0.01%. Democracy be done with it.

By “moving forward” to the Rudd summit of 2008 (or as Bolt points out, the Republican deliberative-poll farce of 1999) Gillard thinks if we pin down 150 people and subject them to more PR, more staged events, and what… are we giving them a job for a year? She thinks this will do the trick?

On the Republican committee of 1999, Bolt shows how bad it was at being a guide to the public consensus:

After two days of solid nagging, these (350) “ordinary Australians” backed the republic by an overwhelming 73 per cent. Just one month later the rest of the nation voted on the same proposal at the referendum—and rejected it in every state.

This is not how democracy works. We elected representatives to consider issues, we don’t draw names out of hats. If our elected reps won’t read both sides of the story and make up their minds, let’s have a referendum.

The only good news is this “plan” will cost the country a million times less than the ETS.

POST NOTE: The bad news is that it will cheat the country out of a proper debate.

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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Another 10 of the Worst AGW papers: Part 3

Guest post by Cohenite

To natural born critics AGW is the gift that keeps giving. It would be cruel to say these papers all exhibit unworldly qualities because that is inevitable if your purpose is to generate a virtual reality with computer modeling. But, as the old saying goes, you have to be cruel to be kind; so some of these papers are speculative and unrealistic; others are eristic and the rest egregious in intent or execution. A scientific theory such as AGW is, like all human endeavours, only as good as its best examples; the following papers, all peer reviewed, represent the best of AGW. The papers are in no particular order, or lack thereof, of merit.

Part I and Part II of The Worst Papers according to Cohenite. Conversely: Ten of the best

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8.2 out of 10 based on 5 ratings

Flashback: The rise of the unskeptical scientist

People from the How Arrogant Art Thy Name-calling thread were wondering what we call people who toss out “Denier.” I suggested that the best response to “denier” is just to point out they are name-calling thugs trying to stop people talking about the evidence.

That said, the discussion reminded me that I had another more sneaky, devious and comic response way back two days before ClimateGate broke, (and my web traffic numbers soared) and many people may have missed this post. Times have changed since then, and now even Pachauri is paying token lip service to the “value of skeptics”. But there are still plenty of people who want to disown the word skeptic because of the long PR campaign to slur it. I say that only makes it o-so-much more valuable. Let’s use their own PR campaign against them.

The rise of the unskeptical scientist

Nov 17, 2009: I’ve done it, I’ve finally solved the dilemma of how to refer to scientists who actively promote a crisis due to carbon, but can’t provide the evidence that carbon causes major warming. Not Team-AGW, not alarmist, a far better one has come to me.

Once upon a time, a scientist and a skeptic used to be one and the same thing. Actually, it still is. The motto of The Royal Society — the longest lived scientific association in the world, is Nullius in Verba — “On no one’s word” (take no one’s word for it). The Climate Industry marketing has tried to turn “skeptic” into a dirty word. So in perfect symmetry, if we are Skeptical Scientists, they are obviously:

the Unskeptical Scientists

(or “Unskeptics” for short).

What could be more appropriate?

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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

How arrogant art thy name-callers?

Ivar Giaevar

The guys at Popular Tech have done a Very Nice List. They’ve put together seven names of eminent scientists who are skeptical of man-made climate catastrophe, along with their stellar biographies and quotes. It tells us nothing about the climate, but before you write it off as just a fallacious appeal to authority, ponder that these eminent people are the same people that teenage tree-huggers would call “deniers”.

To see just how mindlessly puerile “denier” is, try the thought experiment of putting those-who-use-it in the same room as one of the more notable “deniers”.

Julia Gillard (the new PM downunder) used “denier” 11 times in one recent speech. So imagine she’s in a room talking with, say, Ivar Giaever. She studied arts and law, he got a PhD in theoretical physics two years before she was born, and won a Nobel Prize by the time she was nine. Picture him talking atmospheric physics and her telling him he’s a denier.

Julia Gillard, PM of Australia. Source: The Daily Telegraph

A Nobel doesn’t mean he’s right, but when Gillard says “Denier” she is referring to thousands of people including Freeman Dyson, Ivar Giaever (Nobel Prize), Robert Laughlin (Nobel Prize), Edward Teller, Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow and William Nierenberg.

The arrogance of all those who use this inane form of name-calling ought be exposed for exactly what it is, a cheap tactic to intimidate people who disagree, and a big bluff. The smug conceit of “denier” implies that the answer is so obvious it’s not even worth discussing. Thus it’s main purpose is to stop people talking about the finer points, the pros and cons, the weight of the evidence. It’s a form of censorship and has no place in a scientific discussion.

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9 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

Finally! The long awaited Italian Translation

Click to download The Italian Translation of The Skeptics Handbook

Dario Buso has finally accomplished a task I’ve been looking forward too for a long time. The Italian Translation of The Skeptics Handbook is here ready to be sent to all your friends among the 62 million speakers of Italian around the world.

He has done a marvelous job of putting it all together, along with help on the in-depth and careful review work done by Guido Botteri and Patrick. It’s just another example of the remarkable productivity of exasperated people. Citizens who won’t let the half-truths and distortions stand unopposed.

As always these things take a team (all up, involving people in six countries).

Dario writes:

Guido and I would also like to mention the final review by Colonel Guido Guidi, an Italian Army weather forecaster who manages and presents some weather forecast programs on national RAI TV channel. Col. Guidi also keeps a very informative blog in Italy on the status of the global climate, as a skeptic of the AGW hypothesis. He’s our Anthony Watts “made in Italy”…

Guido’s Italian blog is Climate Monitor.

The 15th translation of The Skeptics Handbook.

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7.4 out of 10 based on 7 ratings

Did GISS discover 30% more land in the Northern Hemisphere?

… **😮 UPDATED with GLOBAL values! The questions get bigger. (See below) July 18th.**

Frank Lansner has been a busy man, and he’s asking some very thought provoking questions.

The Northern Hemisphere has a ratio of 40% land to 60% oceans, and the Hadley Met Centre seems to use a similar ratio (NH HadCrut Series: 58% ocean, 42% land). But Frank Lansner wondered why, when he graphed the GISS land-data-set alongside the combined-sea-surface-temperatures (CSST), GISS comes up with an “averaged” line that runs much closer to the land data set and not the sea surface set. If it were weighted 60:40 (ocean:land) the combined Northern Hemisphere line ought to run slightly closer to the ocean based temperatures.

So Lansner mixed the land and sea temperatures in different ratios and graphed them and an odd thing occurred. Perhaps there is some good reason for it, but the GISS NH average line is currently running close to a mix that could be almost 70% land, and only 30% ocean. Back in 1985 the NH Average was closer to the sea temps as would be expected. In fact as late as 1995, the NH line still ran at around 40% land area. But somewhere post 1995 – 1999 for some reason (see the update at the bottom for some good suggestions) the average tracks closer to the 70% line. According to Frank, this effect does not occur with the HadCrut average.

…

GISS temperatures compared with land ocean ratios

GISS temperatures compared with different ratios of land: ocean data values. See below for a description of the CSST (Combined Sea Surface Temperature).

…

Frank is looking for feedback and suggestions, and wondering if there could be any other explanation. So am I. The effect is clear also in this graph. The land-based datasets are the brown ones near the top. The blue ones in the middle are GISS and then below that Hadley, then finally the black line is the satellite measured average for land and sea, and the combined sea surface temperatures. It’s interesting how closely the satellite set compares with the sea surface data.

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8.5 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

Abbreviations Page

I’ve added a page with a list of abbreviations, there’s a link to it in the sidebar on the top right. If you are looking for an abbreviation and can’t find it, or have a correction to make, please comment here so we can improve the page.

The “find things” list at the top right is becoming more organized and useful. (Yes, the social events page needs to be updated).

Find things

Thanks to both Bob, Rob and Barry who compiled the list. Sorry it’s taken so long to get it finished.

10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Abraham surrenders to Monckton. Uni of St Thomas endorses untruths.

John Abraham, University of St Thomas.

What do you do when someone speaks against your faith, sounds authoritative, well informed, and backs everything up with lots of evidence? If you’re sane, you change your mind.

If you are John P. Abraham, a lecturer in fluid mechanics at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, you write to a few select scientists distorting what your opponent said, and then collect the infuriated responses. Abraham went on to assemble a list of things Christopher Monckton didn’t say, complained about things he didn’t cite (even if he did and it’s printed on his slides), pretended he couldn’t find sources (but didn’t take ten minutes to ask), and created a litany of communication pollution in an effort to denigrate Monckton’s character.

The untruths and fabrications have come back to bite him.

We’ve seen these tactics before. Tim Lambert (aka Deltoid) did a similar thing when he ambushed Monckton with quotes from Pinker that he arranged with emails he still hasn’t revealed. And when it comes to attacking things, graphs and arguments that weren’t made, John Cook of SkepticalScience did the same with his attempt to rebut the Skeptics Handbook. What matters to the religious is not the details, but the keywords. They hope that if they use confident bluster to mention the same hot topics in general, and find mistakes in reasoning that someone else said (and it may be someone imaginary), it will win the PR war. The attack-dogs get their dog food, the daily-bread of misinformation, and it keeps those pesky skeptics busy pointing out error after error, tying them up for days.

Monckton replied on June 10th with a 84-page letter and 466 questions, in a polite list of mistakes, errors, and misquotes pointing out how embarrassing it was for a learned center of higher education to be seen in the same domain-name as such a malign, uninformed and dishonest production. He gave Abraham and the university a month to apologize, remove the embarrassing video, and pay $110k to a Haitian charity. Calling Monckton’s reply “detailed” and “comprehensive” is an understatement. It’s exhaustive, enumerating, eviscerating.

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7.6 out of 10 based on 24 ratings

The ranks are splitting, tossing incantations as they go

We always knew Climategate would the test the cohesion of the “team”. The reputations of good greens, good journalists, and decent politicians (there are a few) are on the line. They have to draw a line somewhere, and six months later, a few more cracks in the wall are showing.

Even people who think we need action against CO2 are not convinced by the whitewashes. And for many of them, it’s not the ClimateGate emails themselves which pushed them over the edge, but the blatantly surreal nature of the so-called inquiries that don’t ask the basic questions or invite the key people.

Phrases about how the science is still settled (even though the scientists themselves might cheat) are like a pass-code that allows commentators to say something pointed against the tribal witchdoctors without getting too many nasty spells cast on them by the disciples.

Of course, in order to attack any part of the great facade, it’s important to recite the incantation against bullies. Phrases about how the science is still settled (even though the scientists themselves might cheat) are like a pass-code that allows commentators to say something pointed against the tribal witchdoctors without getting too many nasty spells cast on them by the disciples. By using the incantation they mollify the bullies who would hurl abuse.

“Flawed scientists”

The Economist suggests there’s still a carbon-related crisis, but that if we ditch Pachauri, it will all be ok. Their essential incantation is right up in the subheader: ” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change needs reform. The case for climate action does not.”

Then having mentioned … “ClimateGate” they have to throw in another meaningless recitation: “Neither report does anything to weaken the case for acting to limit carbon emissions.” Well no. The reports wouldn’t say that would they? The reports were not supposed to audit and redo the entire IPCC declarations in a weekend, and they didn’t ever ask that question: Does carbon cause catastrophic warming? It’s more communication pollution as journalists, possibly unconsciously, cave in to the social pressure to reaffirm their attendance at the church.

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9.7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

The Climate Spectator joins the gravy train

Here we go again. I like Alan Kohler, the economic reporter on the nightly ABC news. He likes numbers, graphs and hard data. Yet here he is, setting up a new project which looks like it ‘s another climate clone site analyzing everything carbon-related in the harsh light of day except the assumption about climate “feedbacks” that the whole error cascade is based on. (This is the same assumption that the empirical evidence has shown was too high by a factor of six.) [See here for my latest demolition and here where a Dr of Paleoclimate comes unstuck.]

The Business Spectator wrote so sagely and incisively about the Super Profits Tax, I’d love to think they would apply the same sharp brainpower to the issue of climate. But Kohler writes:

“We were initially despondent when the CPRS was kicked into the long grass by Kevin Rudd,…”

Despondent? Imagine them saying “Interest rates were raised and we were despondent?”

But Kohler and the other economic commentators have been caught watching the money instead of the reasoning (they’re watching the wrong money too, here’s the money that speaks volumes). If upper tropospheric water vapor doesn’t increase as the world warms, the reason for the worldwide carbon market is null and void. And the radiosonde evidence, for example, is pretty insistent that it doesn’t. This is good news for the carbon shorts, but I guess the Climate Spectator won’t be reporting that universal cataclysmic systemic risk.

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10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Smell that evidence

Following up on the story of the Thompsons.

I protested that vague open ended legislation that allows officials to use opinions rather than empirical evidence is a stepping stone to tyranny, and naturally people had questions about the details. Have the Thompsons been treated unfairly, are the complaints legitimate? Could we tell?

So let’s visit the empirical evidence

This is the record of complaints from the Agricultural College, the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC), and the smell tests conducted by the Department of Agriculture and Food WA (DAFWA).

Given all the variables and biases involved, we can’t say much in detail. Humor me. Here’s how I see it:

Cows and complaints don’t correlate. Complaints doubled as the number of cows halved.
The worst smells in town (when the wind is from the right direction) correlate with hot months, but also clearly with less cows.
The Agricultural College says things are so bad that “enrollments are being affected” but no one there thought to complain until mid 2008, and then as cattle numbers fell, apparently people at the college became much more likely to complain, and 2009 was a bumper year for grievances, though cattle numbers were half of what they were back in happy-cheesy-2007. The Ag College complaints spike of Aug 2008 correlate with the lowest cattle numbers for the whole 2.5 year period.
The Shire complaint log for 2006 records only 10 complaints for the entire year, yet stock levels were equivalent to those in 2009 where there were 20-30 “complaints” a month, and this is after the Thompsons implemented all the odour reducing measures that were suggested.

Narrogin Beef: Odour Complaints and detections (left axis) and Cattle Stocking (right axis)

Looks like the way to reduce smells is to insist the Thompsons keep their stock numbers above 10000 cows because when the cow numbers drop the smells get worse :-).

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10 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

Friday night reading: the eloquent take-downs

Today, while I work on something else, I thought I’d just share a few of the more entertaining pieces of writing I’ve come across lately.

How many mistakes can you pack in one phrase?

Remember how all defenders of the Man-Made-Catastrophe were trained to say that skeptics are funded by big oil, and Big Oil had that insidious agreement… that internal memo that said they were aiming to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” (which has all the meaning of “repositioning McDonalds as a fast food chain”, it being tritely obvious and all). Well, Russell Cook points out that this popular bumper-sticker line that’s quoted ad lib across the ether, is full of mistakes, misattributions and misinformation. It seems it’s not only not a smoking gun, but it’s not a weapon, and wasn’t fired by the prize winner shooter they attributed it too, and the guy that didn’t fire the dud shot, didn’t win a prize either.

With fanfare according to Gore it was “discovered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan”, but the Pulitzer site doesn’t know about Gelbspans “prize”, and you can read all the sordid details at the Climate Gate Country Club, or a different version at American Thinker.

Science in an Echo Chamber

Front Page magazine has a very fluent take-down of the recent NAS blacklist of skeptical scientists (And I mocked The National Academy of Sorcery here).

Every time you think that the global warming crowd couldn’t be any more ridiculous or brazen, somebody manages to turn the shameless meter up another notch. This month’s offering from the alarmists is a “scientific” study that basically demonstrates that alarmists are right about climate change because alarmists who believe they are right about climate change publish a lot of papers that demonstrate how right they are about climate change. That isn’t circular logic. Circular logic would be embarrassed to be seen in the same room as this study. This sort of tortured reasoning is so twisted that M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali would have trouble coming to grips with it.

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… **😮 UPDATED with GLOBAL values! The questions get bigger. (See below) July 18th.**