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Tyranny: How to destroy a business with environmental red tape

Updated with Janet’s comments below.

Matt and Janet Thompson are at the end of the rope

Did you know in Australia it’s possible to ruin a business if you don’t like the way it smells? This is a heartbreaking story — that a government could effectively ruin a family by slowly strangling them in red tape, and that they would have apparently no protection from the courts or the ombudsman. It eats away at our sense of justice. Can we speak freely? Are we all treated equally under the law, or are some laws only enforced according to a capricious whim?

This is the price we pay for vague laws where business people can run ventures, do everything to the letter of the law, with best-practice procedures, winning customers and contracts, yet go broke despite all that because of onerous, impossible-to-meet conditions, that are unmeasurable, and change suddenly, with the added bonus of inordinately long delays. At the moment, Janet and Matts farm, Narrogin Beef Producers, lies empty, unstocked, while debts accrue by the minute.

This is also a story of sovereign risk. Investors in Australian industry beware.

Unused equipment that cost hundred of thousands of dollars lies idle.

How can any business survive the need to get two-yearly licenses which take more than 12 months to arrange; where after four years of planning and preparation, capacity can be suddenly halved without warning; where an appeals process can take 18 months and when the original capacity is finally restored, not only are many new stipulations added, but the expiry date is not extended. After 30 months of a grinding process, the farmer is only left with 6 months before the amended license expires and no way to take out loans based on such an uncertain future.

If the government were a private business paid to arrange licenses, and expected to be evidence based and to respond in a reasonable time, then they would have no customers. Indeed, they could be sued.

Matt and Janet were told their license would be a formality, and they took out loans and contracts for water and grain in advance. Their input costs last year added up to around $10 million dollars. When the capacity was halved there was no way under the laws of biology and commerce that they could bring in the cash flow to meet those costs. When they appealed, they was no timeframe, no indication it would take 18 months to be resolved, so they took out loans, bore the costs, the interest, and paid for water they did not use, and grain no cow would eat. Their money was effectively squandered by the unpredictable rulings of the state government.

Bear in mind, the Thompsons have broken no laws. Most of this case boils down to a small number of complaints about odour. I would not wish foul smells on anyone, but the evidence there is suggests the problem is minor, and the level of complaints has no relation to the number of stock on the Thompson’s farm in any case. There is the troubling possibility that if someone took a dislike to another party, or had another vested interest in property nearby, or in a competing business, theoretically they could solicit complaints and exaggerate. How would we know? It’s hard to photograph a smell. It’s an avenue ripe for exploitation. Lets keep things in perspective, Janet and Matt live at their farm, closer than anyone else to any odours and emissions, and their farm is next to a piggery (ferrgoodnesssake) which has been there for more than 20 years.

From 5 km away in the town could anyone tell if a waft of something not-nice was from a cow, or a pig, or the roadkill around the corner?

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10 out of 10 based on 6 ratings
July 8th, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: AGW socio-political, Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

The Unskeptical Guide to the Skeptics Handbook

It’s taken 21 months, four professors, and three associate/assistant professors, and THIS is the best they could come up with? The printed version listed no author (the pdf has been updated with John Cooks name*) yet wears the logo of the University of Western Australia (UWA), which will embarrass that university as word spreads of the intellectual weakness of their “Guide“.

Did UWA commission this piece of rather inept, qualitative “feel-good” science and clumsy reasoning? Stephan Lewandowsky invited John Cook to speak at UWA and “offer assistance“.

The booklet uses a mislabeled graph with a deceptive scale, won’t show the damning graphs it supposedly debunks,  assumes positive feedback occurs despite the weight of empirical evidence against it (Douglass, Spencer, Lindzen), and repeats irrelevant information even though The Skeptics Handbook describes why rising sea levels and glaciers and ice sheets can’t possibly tell us what causes the warming. It misleadingly discusses a different fingerprint — one that isn’t the key point and isn’t disputed by skeptics. Cause and effect are mixed up, and naturally there are strawmen arguments to unnecessarily destroy for the spectacle of being seen to do something. To top it off, Cook still thinks a measurement is a force of nature that could affect the climate. It’s just confused.

There’s a shell game. Evidence for the direct effect of carbon is not evidence that positive feedback will amplify the results

Most of all, the deceptive shell game continues. The Guide offers evidence that supports a direct effect of carbon which amounts to one measly degree if carbon levels double. It offers no evidence that positive feedback will amplify the results up to a wildly high 3 or 4 degrees, and it does not inform readers that there is empirical evidence that the feedback is negative and will thus attenuate that one minor degree. Thus the half-truths are broadcast, but the lies by omission border on deception.

On the plus side, Cook has risen above ad homs and argument from authority. It’s only taken two years, but at last a critic has managed to stick just to evidence of sorts.  That said, John Cook’s post that launched the guide links to a paid bully boy attack site written by a hired professional marketing team. DeSmog’s shameful practice of smearing researchers is one of the lowest points in modern science. Yet Cook links to it, apparently endorsing their ad hominem approach. We-the-people are not fooled or intimidated by kindergarten namecalling. If he had any standards of reasoning, he would not promote the attack dogs. If he was a man of principle he would condemn DeSmog for their unscientific behaviour.

Aside from the name-calling, Desmog are scientifically embarrassing. I debunked their first effort: “Desmog accidentally vindicates the Skeptics Handbook“. I’ve also debunked Deltoid as well, a post so successful it put this blog on the map. Deltoid had no reply. Cook might be surprised if he read my responses to those pages he linked too. Of all the efforts “debunking” the Skeptics Handbook, Cook’s is the best — but with the rest of the field stuck in the stone-age, that’s no badge of honor.

Looking for the short guide to “how do I know who is right?”

Try this:

  • I quote who-ever-they-are directly, I use their words, their references, and their graphs. I explain the exact reasons why they’re wrong. When I paraphrase, I make it clear.
  • They rephrase what I say, attack some other point, won’t reproduce the graphs I use, nor discuss the references I give. They don’t claim they found errors in the Handbook, because they can’t — just “misunderstandings” which turn out to be theirs.

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8.3 out of 10 based on 41 ratings
July 5th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming, The Skeptics Handbook | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Sherwood 2008: Where you can find a hot spot at zero degrees

The line blurs between peer-reviewed-science and peer-reviewed-public-relations.

The Big-Scare-Campaign needed an answer to the missing hot-spot question. They needed to find the “hot spot”, or failing that, at the very least provide a “hot spot” type graph that would answer the critics; something that passed for a scientific answer that might fool journalists and bloggers. The failure to find the projected hot spot is so damning, and so obviously not what the models predicted, that there is a veritable industry of people working hard to find a reason why the weather balloon results must be wrong.  Steven Sherwood creatively even resorted to throwing out the thermometer readings entirely and using wind shear instead.  (If only we’d known! All those years and we didn’t need the thermometers?)

In Robust Tropospheric Warming Revealed by Iteratively Homogenized Radiosonde Data (March 2008) Sherwood et al combine both windshear and temperature data to reconsider the radiosondes yet again. The Scientific Guide to The Skeptics Handbook and others use the graph from the top left corner of this paper (Fig 1 here) to suggest that the hot spot is not missing, or that the “fingerprint” was found. Sure enough, it’s a cute graph. Looks “hot”, right?

Sherwood 2008 models vs observations

Fig 1. Sherwood 2008: observations (top two) vs models(bottom two).  (Note the scale!)

Peek closely at the scale of the graph. Note the color of zero — that’s right — if there was no global warming in the entire atmosphere, no change, nothing at all happening, the Sherwood interpretation would look like one giant hot-spot:

No change means still looking “hot”

With poor resolution and a carefully chosen color scale the top graphs give the glancing impression that models aren’t doing too badly. But the color scale above is not just counter intuitive, it actively prevents anyone from comparing the trend in the upper troposphere with the surface. Any warming trend at all is “red”. Trend information is lost within the graph. (I considered trying to recolor it but all reds are red if you know what I mean. 101 shades of red might work well for snakes with infrared acuity…).

None of the authors, editors, or peer reviewers apparently had any problem with a graph with the meaningless scale. It’s just another endorsement of what you get with anonymous unpaid reviewers.

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7.8 out of 10 based on 12 ratings
July 3rd, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

The Great Leap Forward. Professors et al realize they need to talk about evidence instead of insults.

Plenty of copies

Scientific Guide To Skeptics Handbook

"Scientific Guide" To The Skeptics Handbook

I’m elated. Last night outside the Watts Up lecture at UWA here in Perth there were people handing out a so-called “Scientific Guide” to the Skeptics Handbook. Let’s put this in perspective, I wrote the Handbook two years ago, and it’s taken this long for those-who-want-to-scare-us to put together a specific printed response. I’m an unbacked, solo pro bono writer, and they needed no less than 5 professors, 2 associate professors, and 21 months, and THIS is the best they can do?

I’m also chuffed. The infamous Professorial fellow Stephan Lewandowsky spoke the night before in the same room as we spoke in (about the dangers of consensus) but maybe he’s finally read my multiple responses to the stone age reasoning he was using and the light bulb has gone off. Maybe he’s realized that the masses of engineers, geologists, lawyers, medical experts and people with just plain common sense out there are never going to be fooled by his old witchdoctor routine about the Gods of Science at the IPCC. I was informed by people who saw the presentation that for the first time he spoke without resorting to obvious errors of reasoning.

Handing out the Guide

Likewise the Scientific Guide makes a lot of whitewashy mistakes; still won’t show the graphs I show; confoundingly obscures the “fingerprint” that was presented by Santer and the CCSP, and makes baseless assertions, uses graphs with dodgy scales, assumes that positive feedback occurs and throws in a venetian blind strawman. Nonetheless, finally Professors are rising above Argument from authority and ad hominem attacks. The word “Denier” has disappeared.

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10 out of 10 based on 8 ratings
July 1st, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

The Watts Up Tour in WA

Narrogin Observer Climate Skeptics Headline

Narrogin Observer Climate Skeptics Headline (Click to read it)

UPDATE: See Quadrant for Anthony’s thoughts on this news story.

For those who are wondering, The WA leg of the Watts Up tour was thoroughly enjoyed by many. People drove up from as far as Albany to watch us in Narrogin – three hours each way on a dark foggy night.

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9.4 out of 10 based on 17 ratings
June 30th, 2010 | Tags: | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Learn how not to reason at the University of Western Australia

Picasso-Brain-Strikes-the-Climate-Debate: Can't think. Can't reason.

Tomorrow night the University of Western Australia (UWA) is hosting “Climate change scepticism under the spotlight”, where people who ought to know better are reverting to stone age reasoning. “Hail the Gods of Science!”  The shame, the shame, it’s my old university.

Australian Professorial Fellow Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, from UWA’s School of Psychology, will discuss the perils of ignoring consensus in science…

The UWA School of Science ought to be grovelling embarrassed. Any scientific professorial fellow ought to warn about the dangers of ignoring the empirical evidence, or the perils of missing the whistleblowers who point out logical flaws.

Can we add that up?

Let’s follow the reasoning on consensus science. How do you weight the scoring system?  Is one post-doc worth 3 honors students, or 5?  Do we dilute citation-value according to the number of authors on each paper? Does a Nobel peace prize winner trump a class of undergraduates? Quick, we need a committee to figure it out. I can feel the need for a emergency formation of the Scientific-Authority-Demarkation-Institute. UN based of course.

I have written many times about how Lewandowsky uses Argument from Authority ad nauseum along with ad hominems, and lightly seasoned with Argument from Ignorance. (Picasso Brain Syndrome is probably my choice pick.) I saw him speak at a similar venture in December, and he spent several minutes on a long rambling ad hom about John McLean. It’s worse than just being unbecoming. We should not tolerate this poor standard of reasoning in an undergraduate of science, let alone a teaching staff member.

The Witchdoctors have moved into the Faculty of Science (which is now BTW awkwardly known as Life and Physical Sciences).

Scientists one and all, it’s time we talk about the dangers of consensus.  The Truth, whatever it is, does not lie with qualifications, committees, or unmeasurable “esteem”.

The big problem for us is, how do we reclaim the universities? Can we shame them into picking up their standards?

BTW: I will be speaking in Narrogin tomorrow, and at UWA on Tuesday, so not much time for blogging…

8.4 out of 10 based on 7 ratings
June 28th, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming, Logic & Reason | Print This Post Print This Post | |

How John Cook unskeptically believes in a hot spot (that thermometers can’t find)

John Cook might be skeptical about skeptics, but when it comes to government funded committee reports, not so much.

The author of “skeptical science” has finally decided to try to point out things he thinks are flaws in The Skeptics Handbook. Instead, he misquotes me, shies away from actually displaying the damning graphs I use, gets a bit confused about the difference between a law and a measurement, unwittingly disagrees with his own heroes, and misunderstands the climate models he bases his faith on. Not so “skeptical” eh John? He’s put together a page of half-truths and sloppy errors and only took 21 months to do it. Watch how I use direct quotes from him, the same references, and the same graphs, and trump each point he tries to make. His unskeptical faith in a theory means he accepts some bizarre caveats while trying to whitewash the empirical findings.

In the end, John Cook trusts the scientists who collect grants funded by the fear-of-a-crisis and who want more of his money, but he’s skeptical of unfunded scientists who ask him to look at the evidence and tell him to keep his own cash.

These two graphs are not the same

…

The Climate Models predict a hot spot the weather balloons can't find any trace of. See the deadly graphs.

The climate models predict a hot-spot over the tropics. The weather balloons show there is no sign of it. Quote the CCSP report graph (A) is described as: “PCM simulations of the vertical profile of temperature change due to …well mixed greenhouse gases.”

Thousands of radiosondes, and three decades of satellite measurements show unequivocally that there is no hot spot, not a hint, or glimmer, nothing within a standard deviation of what the catastrophic models expected. Watch Cook struggle against the vast weight of the empirical evidence. He “knows” the hot spot pattern is there even though the thermometers disagree… “Unfortunately, that elusive hot spot has been devilishly hard to measure.” Devilish indeed. The rest of the global atmosphere is measurable, but up there in the critical zone above the tropics, the radiosondes hit the Bermuda Triangle of equipment failures.

Ground thermometers are so clever that John’s happy to trust they give accurate readings of trends, even when people build airports next to them. But up in the sky, repeated day after day for decades, the thermometer results around the climatically weird zone are still so uncertain that a completely clear unambiguous result is, err, obviously “wrong”. He doesn’t trust the simple temperature sensors in radiosondes, but he does trust a computer algorithm that converts wind-shear to degrees C. He won’t trust weather balloons, but he trusts the impenetrably complex atmospheric simulations. He won’t trust the long term data, but he does trust monthly analysis using the same equipment. Cook is a study in faith, hope, and flawed reasoning.

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7.4 out of 10 based on 7 ratings
June 26th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

PNAS: Witchdoctors of science — Anderegg’s blacklist of scientists

PNAS-satire-climate-science

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: a step back to the Stone Age

A shameful day in the history of science. The once esteemed National Academy of Science is reduced to pagan witchcraft: point the bone at the blacklist, count the tea-leaf-citations, put on your funny hat and make a prophesy about the weather.

Some critics are saying the survey is flawed because it uses artificial groupings. Artificial be damned — the survey is flawed because it’s a waste-of-time work of anti-science for even existing. Science is not a democracy. Natural laws don’t form because anyone says so, and the only way to find out the answer is to … look at the evidence. Doh.

This adulation of individuals and tests of character, “success”, or popularity is the anti-thesis of what the great brains-trust of science ought to do. In science all minds test their theories against the universe, and only the real world matters. The petty world of human reputations is steeped in bias and conflicts of interest with personality defects and political power grabs, not to mention the corrupting influence of money. Science achieved vast success for civilization by freeing us from exactly this cess-pool of complexity, to rise above the posturing and consider only impartial observations.

Which Doctor or Witchdoctors?

Since the dawn of time tribal witchdoctors have been forecasting storms and asking us to pay tribute to their idols. The NAS has descended into abject farce. Argument by authority is the disguise of the witchdoctor — Trust me, I am the chosen one.

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8.5 out of 10 based on 12 ratings
June 23rd, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: Global Warming, Logic & Reason | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Bankers spread into “science”

Our CSIRO is supposed to serve the people of Australia to impartially help advise them of the risks and benefits of different actions with the latest science but oopsie, the team who picked the new Chairman clean forgot.  Instead of someone who speaks in sage tones about uncertainties, they pick a former banking Mergers and Acquisitions Chief who’s an avowed advocate and activist, and happy to admit he’s got a predetermined agenda science-wise.

Should the CSIRO ever (accidentally) discover that the climate models were all based on an error cascade and a guess that went wrong, Mr McKeon will jump up and down to see that those results are pursued, funded, promoted issued in press releases and put into education campaigns for kids and journalists, err… right? I mean, he’s our man isn’t he — making sure the Australian citizens he serves are not ripped off by trickster scientists who “can’t account for the lack of warming” and who “hide declines”.

What were they thinking?

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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
June 22nd, 2010 | Tags: | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Meet the believers… smile

Sometimes there’s just no point. Do they think ad hominem is a spice in an Arabic dip? What can you say? Just smile and go back to doing your damnedest to work for free so that they and their children might have a bit more freedom from tyranny and a bit more of their hard earned cash in their wallet. If you succeed, they’ll probably never thank you, but it’s still a job worth doing. Cheers!

Anthony Watts, and David Archibald will be speaking in Melbourne Tuesday night. Don’t miss your last chance to see the heroes of the grassroots independent scientists. Read my thoughts on Anthony and David. Get more info from the Climate Sceptics.

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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
June 22nd, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Save the world — whitewash the Andes

Painting rocks on Chalon Sombrero (Image: BBC)

File this in unrealized parody. The BBC beats the Onion.

The World Bank has awarded a Peruvian inventor $200,000 to paint rocks white. They hope if they make them the right colour the glacier will come back…

Can painting a mountain restore a glacier?

It is the first experimental step in an innovative plan to recuperate Peru’s disappearing Andean glaciers.
The World Bank clearly believes the idea – the brainchild of 55-year-old Peruvian inventor, Eduardo Gold – has merit as it was one of the 26 winners from around 1,700 submissions in the “100 Ideas to Save the Planet” competition at the end of 2009.

Although he is yet to receive the $200,000 (£135,000) awarded by the World Bank, his pilot project is already underway on the Chalon Sombrero peak, 4,756 metres above sea level, in an area some 100km west of the regional capital of Ayacucho.

There are no paint brushes, the workers use jugs to splash the whitewash onto the loose rocks around the summit.

It is a laborious process but they have whitewashed two hectares in two weeks.

“Cold generates more cold, just as heat generates more heat,” says Mr Gold.

“I am hopeful that we could re-grow a glacier here because we would be recreating all the climatic conditions necessary for a glacier to form.”

If you had $200,000 to gift to Peru, a place where the GDP per capita is less than $5,000, would you spend it on a program to paint black rocks white in the hope of storing water and changing the local weather?

Reader John P points out that if you check the World Glacier Monitoring Service you will see that the equilibrium line altitude (ELA) of glaciers in the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca is above 4900 m, that means that snow falling below that altitude does not remain over the whole year and melts. Even if it falls on the glacier ice, much less on whitewashed rocks.  Besides, the impact of a few hectares of rock is minimal when compared with the atmospheric circulation or the impact of surrounding terrain.

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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
June 21st, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming, Media-matters | Print This Post Print This Post | |

The fickle nature of a fake free market

Carbon prices have plummeted in the US.

(So they are that much closer to their true value…)

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative sold 40.7 million permits for $1.88 each, 19 cents lower than the last auction held in March and 2 cents above the minimum allowable bid, the cap-and-trade program said on its website today. Each permit in the carbon trading program for power plants from Maryland to Maine represents one ton of carbon dioxide.

Why are prices so low? On the one hand, people have doubts about Congress creating a national market for them. Fair enough. But on the other hand, “Tim Cheung, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance said: “Demand for power hasn’t increased with the economic recovery...”

Since people aren’t buying as much electricity there are spare “permits to pollute” all over the place. But it begs the question of what kind of economic recovery it is, if it doesn’t need … power?

Can I sell you some air over China?

Meanwhile some NGOs are waking up to the scammability of permits for invisible unverifiable goods. CDMWatch was set up by a group of NGO’s and has found the firms that sell the carbon emission offsets are lying about how much they produce, so they can sell more offsets. Who would have guessed?

HFC-23 is 12,000 times as potent as CO2, making it an ultra powerful greenhouse gas, and a hot favourite for companies who want to “destroy greenhouse gases” and get paid for it. The obvious end point in this market being that the easiest most efficient greenhouse gas to destroy is the one you didn’t make in the first place.

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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
June 19th, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Pachauri: we need deniers

Rajendra Pachauri

Rajendra Pachauri and that Bible-thingy

How do you deal with ignominious defeat on a global scale?

If I were a sit-com writer, I’d scoff at the idea of a fictional character as preposterous as Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC. This is the man who refers to skeptics as “flat-earth-deniers who use voo-doo science“. He graciously hopes we skeptics will rub asbestos on our faces (and daily), and in his spare time he writes soft-porn novels.

Six months after the credibility of his favorite lauded scientists was shredded with climategate, and after his own agency was slogged with more scandals than anyone can number (we’ve run out of -gate prefixes), he’s finally realized the pain won’t go away.

Feb 3 this year, he said: Skeptics “are people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder – I hope that they apply it to their faces every day…I’m totally in the clear. I have absolutely nothing but indifference to what these people are doing.”

So this was it, a few days ago, the big BBC moment when he does some damage control, but as far as big moments go, it’s pretty weak, positively half-hearted. The skeptics that embarrassed him? He’s “not deaf” to them, but “there will always be skeptics”, and what must have been a dog-of-a-year for him is referred to as “momentous”. (This is “spin” spun burlesque.)

This is the damage control you do when you are not serious. Kind of baseline support for his followers rather than a message to the world. A soothing chant with ritual familarity.

And of course, he’s trying to rewrite history (or at least confuse us):

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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
June 18th, 2010 | Tags: | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

A thought for the day from 94 years ago

I stumbled across this the other day. Striking how appropriate it is in today’s political cycle. It’s known as the “Ten Cannots”.

…

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatreds.
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

–William J.H. Boetcker, 1916
Noticed on the CCM site. (Thanks Andres).

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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
June 17th, 2010 | Tags: | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Green-socialist-autocrats generate bluster, media copies it

/s3/jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/media/the-sydney-morning-herald-2.gif
I realize non-Australian readers are only so interested in the mining tax debate down-under, but the techniques for an unfair fight are the same everywhere. Instead of answering green-socialist-autocrats on their own ground, we need to raise the debate and expose the way they add confounding fog.

There are rhetorical tricks that friends-of-Big-Government use to promote their own political aims. They reframe debates entirely, and are expert at pouring confusion. Watch how these coalition of Green-Unionified groups appoint themselves as speakers for the people, then ignore the people, they create a false conflict, and turn groups of productive entrepreneurs and hard working employees  into an inanimate entity (the enemy). Read between the lines, the voters are turning away from the option these advocates prefer, therefore the public are easily misled (code for not-too-bright, you know, easily fooled by adverts from billionaires).

“Fairness” is apparently what the anointed decide it is, not what voters actually vote for. These groups believe in a fake democracy. The will of the people only counts if it’s also the will of the anointed.

SMH: Tax debate must return to average Aussie.

Which comes from AAP, which took most of it and rephrased bits from the ACTU media release.

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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
June 15th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: Media-matters | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Noticeboard: EPA law suit interview today, Watts Up Tour starts tomorrow!

Anthony Watts Tour of Australia

The Case Against the EPA, 10am CDST USA

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9.3 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
June 12th, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

The deep oceans drive the atmosphere

IMAGE: Warm layer of the pacific ocean rests on cold water

Ever wondered how the whole planet could suddenly “get warmer” during an El Nino, and then suddenly cool again? William Kininmonth has the answer. As I read his words I’m picturing a major pool of stored “coldness” (bear with me, I know cold is just a lack of heat) which is periodically unleashed on the surface temperatures. The vast deep ocean abyss is filled with salty and near freezing water.  In years where this colder pool is kept in place we have El Ninos, and on years when the colder water rises and mixes up near the surface we have La Ninas. The satellites recording temperatures at the surface of the ocean are picking up the warmth (or lack of) on this top-most layer. That’s why it can be bitterly cold for land thermometers but at the same time the satellites are recording a higher world average temperature, due to the massive area of the Pacific.

In other words, just as you’d expect, the actual temperature of the whole planetary mass is not rising and falling within months, instead, at times the oceans swallow the heat on the surface and give up some “coldness”. At other times, the cold stays buried deep down and the heat can collect and loll about on the surface.

William Kininmonth was chief of Australia‘s National Climate Centre at the Bureau of Meteorology from 1986 to 1998. Below, he describes how a vast pool of cold water filled the deep ocean abyss over 30 million years, and why this water and the currents that shift it have a major impact our climate. The so-called Bottom Layer is not just pockets or pools, it forms around Antarctica, then sinks and flows along the bottom all the way across the equator and into the Northern Hemisphere. Bear in mind the average depth of the ocean is around 4 kilometers, and yet almost all the water below a depth of 1000 m is around 4°C  or colder. The Antarctic Bottom Water itself is close to 0°C. The equivalent heat energy of the entire atmosphere is stored in just the top few meters of water. It gives us all some perspective on the relative importance of different factors affecting the climate. His thoughts are in response to the latest debate essay from Dr Andrew Glikson, so the figures 1 and 2 come from that article.

Kininmonth points out that small changes in the rate of the Thermohaline Circulation (also known as the Ocean’s Conveyor Belt)  makes a huge difference to all corners of the globe, and that the climate models make large assumptions about the flow of energy. Since the cold bottom layer was created by a kind of “Antarctic Refridgerator” (set into play by the circumpolar current) this colossal cold pool of water will presumably hang around until the continents shift. That’s quite a few election cycles.

Jo

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9 out of 10 based on 12 ratings
June 12th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Category: Global Warming, Meteorology, Oceans | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Tradecraft of Propaganda

Image thanks to Andri Krychok

Who knew Nigel Calder’s father was a skeptical reporter who was drawn into writing war time propaganda to help the Brits in World War II? Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist (back before it became Non Scientist), and author of The Chilling Stars, is one of the few science journalists I really admire. So I was delighted when readers here told me Calder had started his own blog, and very interested to read a recent piece by him describing the parallels between World War II propaganda and official Climate Science gloss productions.

My story was about a discovery in the physics of the weather. To find anything comparable you have to go back to the 18th Century. That was when the postmaster of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin by name, flew a kite in a thunderstorm. He proved that lightning is just a big electric spark. To be precise, he described how to do the experiment, and let the French try it first. They lived to tell the tale, so Franklin repeated it for himself. A very prudent postmaster.

In 1996, in Copenhagen, the climate physicist Henrik Svensmark made another discovery just as amazing. He found that the everyday clouds we see in the sky take their orders from the Sun and the stars. I wrote a book about it, called The Manic Sun. Nobody paid much attention, but the scientific evidence went on piling up and last year Henrik and I together published a second book called The Chilling Stars.

Arrange things so it’s easier for others to agree with you

I mentioned leaflets. Billions of them were scattered on German cities and on the front lines. One of the best of these paper weapons, so my Dad told me, was a pamphlet written by a doctor explaining to German troops how to fake illnesses so they’d not have to fight. Rule number one: pretend to be desperate to get back into action. Rule number two: report the symptoms as explained in the booklet, but pretend you’ve no idea what disease they might represent. It was so effective that the Germans translated the pamphlet into English and redirected it at British and American troops.

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9.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
June 11th, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Lawyer busts climate science

This paper has become the zeitgeist. I’ve had countless emails, and I know it’s been mentioned on Pielke, then  by Solomon then Watts Up. Every self respecting skeptic will have looked at by this weekend, if not already. (Thanks to all the people who’ve emailed in the last three days).

My thoughts? For a long scientific review, it’s surprisingly well written, cuts to the core, and it’s a very unusual style of writing: No one is pushing anything, it’s not polarized or written to entertain, yet at the same time, it has compelling clarity. Johnston also exposes the rhetorical flaws in the reasoning and argument styles, which gives it a comprehensive punch.

I’m not used to reading official documents about the climate that are written to actually explain something. It’s 79 pages long, and distinctly lacks any cartoons, or even graphs, but surprisingly, astonishingly, it has sentences that are readable. There are no double barreled vagarisms designed to obscure the meaning while they recite a litany of key phrases, as if the answer is really hidden in there somewhere.  This document doesn’t finish off every other point with speculation that it might be worse than we thought. Even though, actually, as far as science goes, official climate science is worse than we thought. Damning with understated tones.

“Global Warming Advocacy Science: A Cross Examination”

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9.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
June 10th, 2010 | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Government advertising by any other name

Poor writing can throw up a fog to hide dubious claims.

Prasad Menon

Prasad Menon

The Extravaganza of the Deakin Lectures is taking place at the moment in Melbourne, and Des Moore on Quadrant Online accused them of being a one-sided propaganda machine paid for by government money (though not in those exact words).

The Wheeler Centre, Logo.

In response, the Wheeler Centre defended themselves on their blog*, and claimed that Quadrant’s missed the point: They don’t need to do the debating thing because bloggers do that (and they link to moi).

So the Wheeler unit, which is supported by the Victorian Government, EPA Victoria, Carbon Innovators Network, The Age, and the ABC et al defends a policy position taken by Government Departments, and minor clubs like, y’know, the UN,  and yet it’s OK, there’s no fear of government funds being used to propagate a one-sided message, because JoNova is discussing the science (with no government funding, no industry sponsorship, and no university support). So that’s what they call balance.

The rest of us call it government advertising. It’s just a different form. A government-funded unit gets to use taxpayer dollars to prop up a government policy and help large investment funds and a stack of small businesses (friends) as well.  Curiously, this is all supposedly relevant to Melbourne being designated a UNESCO city of Literature, whatever that is.

In any case, the Wheeler Centre may be a “Literature” initiative, but try doing a reading and comprehension test on their literature. Note how the second sentence appears to depend on the first…

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7.5 out of 10 based on 6 ratings
June 9th, 2010 | Tags: | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |
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