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Himalayan glaciers on show

This is a glorious NASA image from The Earth Observatory. The Himalayan Mountains in Southern China on Christmas Day, 2009. If you’d like a large version, you can soak in 4Mb of detail. I’ve posted it just because it’s captivating and we are so fortunate (for all NASA’s failings) that we can marvel at a view like this.

Note the scale (bottom right). These are rivers of ice one kilometer wide “unnamed”. Imagine what it would take to melt this ice?

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7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Spiegel online

Did I say a few days ago there would be more feature articles? Well already, here is another long professional article.

Don’t be put off by the start. The sympathetic treatment of Jones is faint praise, not unreasonable, and in the end, taking an impartial line means telling something of both sides of the story. Articles like this will help skeptics far more than they will help the Big Scare Campaign.

There is plenty of ammo, and punches are landed:

On balance, the entire profession has been seriously harmed by the scandal. “We are currently suffering a massive erosion of trust,” concludes German climatologist Hans von Storch. “Climate research has been corrupted by politicization, just as nuclear physics was in the pre-Chernobyl days, when we were led to believe that nuclear power plants were completely safe.”

That any reasonably unbiased view ends up being supportive of skeptics is, of course, just what you’d expect of a topic where skeptics have so much of that essential ingredient reality on their side. I found the whole article worth reading, and I expect Parts 3 & 4 are the most interesting to skeptics. It’s good to finally see the work of people like McIntyre and McKitrick making it into the realms of the mainstream media.

Journalists should have been knocking on their doors back in 2004.

McIntyre must be bemused to learn he apparently has supporters who know how to hack. I mean, I presume the hackers or whistle blowers were “supportive of McIntyre”, but it’s a tad rich to imply they were trying to help him. Could it just be that someone in the UK (or Canada, Australia, or the US, say) was a bit put out that entire national economies were being offered on a platter to bankers?

It’s not surprising that it took three writers to pull this together. They have managed to condense entire PhD’s on topics like hurricanes down to a paragraph or two. That’s no mean feat. I’m looking forward to seeing more of these in-depth articles, and expect that the effect of them will be significant.

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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

GreenLeft, 3000 years behind the scientific times

Green Left Weekly has attacked the lone voice of reason at the Australian ABC (Chairman Maurice Newman), and demanded he be removed, all because Newman dared to suggest to ABC reporters that they might want to present both sides of the story. How scandalous!

Green Left is an Australian magazine that’s been in publication since 1990. In 2005, it apparently won an award as “Australia’s most popular political site”. How times have changed.

The story: “ABC chair pressures journo’s on climate change”

Green Left effectively claims that Newman is a nasty man who’s trying to “influence” journalists. So what does the Green Left team think it’s trying to do… err, influence journalists? The single point that sucks the moral foundations out from under Green Left is that Newman is not trying to suppress anyone, but the greenies sure are.

Only a few weeks ago, they were claiming to fight for free speech in Brunswick, Melbourne, and a few days ago, for free-speech at Sydney University. When Barkly Square Management confines them to just one stall “in a dead location”, that’s an attack on freedom of speech, but when the ABC chairman suggests reporters interview scientists on both sides of an issue, free-speech be damned: It’s time to howl “intimidation”.

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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

Greenpeace is coming: “We know where you live.”

Watch out people. Greenpeace resorts to threats. Even The Guardian called it a “car crash”.

In their own words:

“We need to hit them where it hurts most, by any means necessary: through the power of our votes, our taxes, our wallets, and more.”

“‘We must break the law to make the laws we need: laws that are supposed to protect society, and protect our future. Until our laws do that, screw being climate lobbyists. Screw being climate activists. It’s not working. We need an army of climate outlaws.’

“The proper channels have failed. It’s time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism.

“If you’re one of those who believe that this is not just necessary but also possible, speak to us. Let’s talk about what that mass civil disobedience is going to look like.

“If you’re one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:

“We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.

“And we be many, but you be few.”

So the guys in green are turning up to my place, eh? I do hope they’ll come to chat about the empirical evidence for water-vapor feedback, but if this is supposed to be what non-violence looks like, I’m missing something. I can’t spot the line where it says, “We’re coming to your place to reason with you.” I just see stuff about breaking laws, “any means necessary,” and “we know where you live”.

It’s hard to believe, but I was a Friend of the Rainbow Warrior once. I donated (we donated) money every month for years. But hey, we all grow up sometime, and then we move on. Some of the people in Greenpeace are good people, but they don’t have any idea what forces are pushing the agenda behind the world-wide “greening”. Many in Greenpeace are just bullies who want an authorized disguise to pour scorn on other people and pretend to be heroic. Greenpeace has become a magnet for thrill-seekers looking for an excuse to pump adrenalin; the sinkhole for those with an undirected tribal yearning; the “football club” for people who want to pretend that their team sport is not a game, but life-and-death, and, of course, morally superior.

Wake up, you’re all being played for fools by big bureaucrats and global banksters.

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10 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

Global Cooling Radio (listen and talk to your favourite skeptics)

Mark Gillar who writes the Hootville Gazette has taken the initiative and arranged a set of radio interviews with the who’s who of skeptics, like Lord Monckton, Patrick Michaels, Ann McElhinney, Marc Morano, Chris Horner, Steve Milloy, Joseph D’Aleo, and yours truly. The first one starts tomorrow morning (US time). You can e-mail or phone in questions. Some details are below, but most are on the Global Cooling Radio site and, of course, details may change in the future, so check in at his site.

Lord Christopher Monckton

Date: April 3, 2010 Time: 10:00 am Central DST To Listen: Visit our BlogTalkRadio Page Call 646-727-3170 to ask a question./p>

OR email to ask in advance [email protected]

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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

UK Parliamentary Report busts all climate scientists

The UK Parliamentary Committee was always going to be a whitewash. They put no skeptics on the committee; they interviewed no skeptics; they didn’t ask Steven McIntyre to speak. The chairman was the “impartial” Phil Willis, who had already made up his mind in January and announced it in the Telegraph:

“There are a significant number of climate change deniers, who are basically using the UEA emails to support the case this is poor science that has been changed or at worst manipulated. We do not believe this is healthy and therefore we want to call in the UEA so the public can see what they are saying”

It’s no wonder the committee made a spin-like press release with wishy-washy weasel words. What’s amazing is that under the spin, they can’t help but bust all of modern climate science.

The UK report: [press release]

“The focus on Professor Jones and CRU has been largely misplaced. On the accusations relating to Professor Jones’s refusal to share raw data and computer codes, the Committee considers that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community but that those practices need to change.

The translation:

We were looking in the wrong spot. We don’t think Phil ought to get busted for just doing what all the other sloppy, biased scientists do. He did hide data, but so does everyone else. The whole of climate science has bogus practices that need to change.

It’s official: common practices across all climate science are so poor they need to change.

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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

Esquire does the full Marc Morano Climategate story

This is the beginning of many full feature length articles that will come as the House of Mann-Made Global Warming collapses. It’s long, but when it’s a professional feature writer drawing a story of a professional scam-buster who works at the highest levels, it’s a great read. Enjoy 🙂 It’s not a grand scientific expose, but it does turn ClimateGate into a human interest story with momentum, and as such, it may reach a wider audience than any scientific expose could.

Photo: Mackenzie Stroh

This Man Wants to Convince You Global Warming Is a Hoax

Marc Morano broke the Swift Boat story and effectively stalled John Kerry’s presidential run. Now he is working against an even bigger enemy: belief in climate change. Somehow, he seems to be winning.

By John H. Richardson

Early on the morning of November 17, Gavin Schmidt sat down at his computer and entered his password. It didn’t work. Strange, he thought. He tried a few other accounts and none of them worked, either. Now he was alarmed. As a leading climatologist with NASA’s Goddard Institute in Manhattan, he’d been hacked before. He was used to e-mails from people who disapproved of his work, threatening e-mails that detailed the romantic life he was going to have in prison. So he knew what to do: He logged in via the Unix shell command.

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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

The truth shall make you free

Art Robinson is a rare man. He’s risen above and laid bare the creeping failure in the infrastructure of modern science over the last 50 years. He describes how the control of the quest for knowledge itself has been usurped from individuals and private industry and taken over by the government.

At the end of the day, what does being a scientist mean if there is nothing other than a certificate? Where is the code of conduct? Where are the professional associations which stand up and decry those who breach the basic requirements? What sense of duty and honor is left in science when high ranking members can make statements that are dishonest and yet keep their jobs and their reputations?

I was struck with Art’s description of a true scientist–where the most important attribute is honesty, where humility is inevitable in anyone who understands how little we comprehend, and where being a scientist is a lifelong search, rather than a 9 – 5 job.

The 10 page paper How Government Corrupts Science is worth reading in full.

Below are some select parts that especially struck a chord with me.

How Government Corrupts Science

Isaac Newton was the greatest scientist who has ever lived, or in Albert Einstein’s words, the most “privileged” of all scientists because of the discoveries that Newton was permitted to make. Einstein describes Newton as “this brilliant genius”… Newton said of himself:

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

During most of its history, when it housed and sponsored the work of many of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, the California Institute of Technology proudly displayed its motto:

The Truth Shall Make You Free.

Today, Caltech’s bureaucrats furtively hide this motto, if they have not canceled it altogether – both its origins and its emphasis on the “truth” being counterproductive to the “business” of “science” in which they are now engaged. Today, the “truth” seems surrounded by “lies,” and those whom we have depended upon to tell the truth appear no longer to be reliable. Worst of all, many of our scientists whom we depend upon to know the truth are … silent.

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9.5 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

Putting ClimateGate in Perspective

Image: ClimateGate Tank arrives in Australia
I attribute much of the recent rapid rise of the skeptics to the ongoing effects of ClimateGate, yet in a sense the emails that were sprung from East Anglia did nothing more than confirm what most skeptics already suspected. Despite that, I’m convinced it was instrumental, and Lawrence Solomon, author of The Deniers, has written an unusually good summary in the form of a speech for the Colorado Mining Association.

With his permission, I’ve included my favourite points here, as well as a copy of the full speech. His blog is a part of the Energy Probe team.

The Climategate emails confirmed much of what the sceptics had been saying for years.

They confirmed that the peer review process had been corrupted, that scientists were arranging friendly reviews.
They confirmed that the science journals had been corrupted.
That journals that refused to play ball with the doomsayers faced boycotts and their editors faced firing.
They confirmed that sceptical scientists were being systematically excluded from the top‐tier journals.
The Climategate emails confirmed that journalists were likewise threatened with boycotts if they didn’t play ball.
The Climategate emails confirmed that the science itself was suspect. That the doomsayers themselves couldn’t make the data work. That they were debating among themselves some of the same points that the sceptics raised, and were privately acknowledging that they didn’t have answers to the issues that the sceptics raised.
The Climategate emails confirmed that the doomsayers were so determined to hide their data from inquiring minds that they were prepared to break the law to hide it – and did break the law – by avoiding Freedom of Information requests.
The Climategate emails confirmed that raw temperature data collected from countries around the world was destroyed. It appears the UK is missing raw temperature data going back to 1850.

The scientists at the heart of the Climategate emails aren’t fringe players on some periphery. They operate what’s known as the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University in the UK. This is the group that collects temperature data, messages it, and then feeds it to the UN and others. This is the data that we have been relying on to tell us if the globe has been warming or not. This same data is then used by virtually everyone in the climate science field who is concerned with historical temperatures.

Without the raw data, it is impossible to confirm that the planet has been warming over the last 150 years. The only ones who now know by how much the planet has been warming, if at all, are the same people who have destroyed the raw data. There are now six separate investigations underway which have been spawned by the Climategate emails. One of those six is by the UK Met Office, which partnered with the Climatic Research Unit in producing the data sets.
The UK Met Office – this is the UK government’s meteorological department – says it will need three years to recreate the data that has been destroyed.

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10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

UK Science Museum hit by skeptical ICBM, makes small concession

The London Science Museum has abandoned it’s fort like barricade–the “NoDebateCorral” and many skeptics are rejoicing that the formerly Gung Ho institute seems to have done a major about-face. I remain highly skeptical of their new “skepticality”.

Remember, this is the same museum that was blatantly telling you the UK taxpayer which policy you were supposed to vote (and pay) for:

Note the claim about “seeing the evidence”. I have seen the light!

This is the team that only last October launched the Proveit Exhibition to “help” Copenhagen. They were not even remotely equivocal then about their political aims and beliefs:

““The Copenhagen conference is a crucial opportunity to find an international solution to the threat of climate change and to transform the way we generate and consume energy…

Dr Vicky Carroll, Prove It! Project Leader and Curator of Science at the Science Museum said: “Scientific evidence shows that climate change is happening. We need to tackle it urgently. Prove it! allows visitors to explore the evidence for climate change in the Science Museum and online, get to grips with the Copenhagen conference, and make their view count.”’

See that phrase: Make their view count? They were hoping to use their poll results to pressure politicians into “doing something”. But the poll results shocked them… with skeptics outnumbering believers by 5 to 1 initially, and amassing thousands of votes). Even though the Museum have made the minor concession of changing the gallery name to “Climate Science” instead of …”Climate Change” I remain very unconvinced that they have really shifted position themselves. The new exhibition won’t open until just before the UNFCCC deals in Mexico, and we all know that these exhibits can be stacked with loaded questions and half truths. If they were willing to get a consultant skeptical scientist, I’d be convinced this might be more than some token “trick” to appear to be impartial, (while they assembled the camouflaged AGW guns in every exhibit).

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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

Stephan Lewandowsky “logic” — science by smear, confusion, ad hom, and irrelevant point

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

Stephan Lewandowsky’s ABC article on climate change was headlined “Opinion Versus Evidence“. Then with dead-pan delivery, he lists the “evidence” but it’s all … opinions.

The question of “delusion” is looming. I mean really, is this a cry for help? There are not many laws of reason that Stephan leaves unbroken. He appeals to authority, attacks the “man”, and talks about everything bar the evidence on climate change. Is he serious? “Trust me” he says, the world is warming because AIDS is real, mass-murderer Ivan Milat was guilty, Lord Monckton is only a non-voting member of the House of Lords, a few skeptics are burko, 97% of paid climate scientists agree that we ought to be worried and keep paying them, and someone has discussed the actual money that climate scientists earn (how could they) and to top it off, the IPCC report is 3000 pages long (!).

Not to mention that Google Scholar (“I’m so technical”) finds lots of hits (thanks to Vice President Al Gore who arranged for the US Government to pay billions of dollars to his favorite researchers, and who also is on the Google advisory team), plus the world has got warmer in the last 150 years. So carbon must have done it then eh?

Shock me. This is science by smear, confusion, obtuse topic, and irrelevant points. Not that we haven’t seen that before, but it’s coming from a professor. He’s really going a long long way out on a limb with baseless, unsubstantiated bluster, and lit up in a neon sign that says–“Reason Free Zone”.

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9.7 out of 10 based on 9 ratings

The sunburnt country is awash

Record-breaking rain means huge Australian arid-land lakes are visible from space.

Australia has one of the most unpredictable rainfall patterns in the world, and this is one of those unpredictable years. For the past few months, the repeated downfalls have left large pools of water lying in arid lands in Western Queensland. It’s great news for farmers. The water will, over the next year, flow south through the Darling River system, restoring parched watercourses, swamps, and dams. The Darling River system flows from Queensland through New South Wales and into South Australia.

Earlier this month, the Bureau of Meteorology announced that the rains were “exceptional”:

The most remarkable aspect of this event was the area covered by the heavy rainfall and the total volume of rainfall that fell. Daily totals exceeded 100 mm over 1.7% of Australia on 1 March and 1.9% on 2 March. The latter is the largest area of 100 mm-plus daily totals on a single day in the Australian meteorological record, breaking the previous record of 1.7% set on 22 December 1956. 28 February was the wettest day on record for the Northern Territory with an NT-wide average of 29.23 mm, while 2 March set a new record for Queensland with a Statewide average of 31.74 mm.

And after that record-breaking rain, the rain kept falling.

But, this year, the widespread repeated rainfall has filled up floodplains. Note the scale. The image is almost 1500 km (900 miles) wide. Photo taken March 14, 2010.

queensland floods 2010

Images thanks to the NASA Earth Observatory.

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8.7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

The BOM & CSIRO report: It’s what they don’t say that matters

Ken Stewart has scanned the trend maps at BOM (Bureau of Meteorology), and his point is spot on. As soon as I saw the neat joint six page advertising pamphlet for the climate-theory-backed-by-bankers, I wondered what happened to the first 60 years of last century, and Ken found it. Did the BOM forget they have hundreds of data points from back then? Did they forget to use their own Website, where you can pick-a-trend, any-trend, and choose the one with err…more convenient results? Or is it the case that their collective mission is not necessarily to provide Australians with the most complete and appropriate information available, but with what the bureaucracy needs them to know? And what they need them to know, apparently, is the carefully censored version of the truth that will keep government ministers happy (Let us tax them more!), keep department heads smiling (Let the climate cash cow continue!), and last, but not least, help staff feel good (We’re sure we’re helping the environment!).

Why censor half their own data?

The trend map page works exquisitely well (I am happy to praise the BOM Web site team). Compare these two trend maps:

Australian Rainfall Trends 1960-2009

The brown bits are the parts that used to get lots more rain in the 1960s. The dark green bits are areas that are quite a lot wetter at the moment than they used to be. But, if we go back past 1960, back to when records started to come together, the trends are decidedly less scary, and, all in all, you’d think Australia might be getting a bit more rain than it did a century ago (you’d be right).

1900-2009 Rainfall trends in Australia

Note that it took not just one national institution to come up with the publication that ignores 60 years of data. The pamphlet is the combined effort of the CSIRO and the BOM, both funded by the people of Australia.

Don’t mention the rising rainfall trend

The team carefully observes that “total rainfall on the Australian continent has been relatively stable”, but doesn’t mention that it has actually increased, as David Stockwell points out. This is supposed to be the state of the Australian climate? According to the BOM itself (see the fine print on that graph), our rainfall has increased by about 6mm a decade over the last 100 years.

Annual Rainfall in Australia 1900-2010

Graph Source

Is there any reason (other than the obvious) for choosing such a censored set of data? Fans of the theory of man-made global warming will rightly point out that most of our emissions of CO2 have come since 1960, and they might dutifully add that “things are worse than we thought” (i.e., the trend is speeding up).

Except on a global scale, the temperature trends of the carbon-forced era (post 1960) aren’t any different than those in the pre-carbon-forced era.

HAdley Global Temperatures 1850-2010

And in science, more data is always a useful thing–especially when it isn’t what you expected. The only reason to censor data is to herd people into reaching one particular conclusion.

Andrew bolt had a fast wrap on the joint BOM CSIRO document.

Media (e.g., The Age) soaked up news of the “report”.

Thanks to Ken for the heads up and help!

8.3 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Carbon market chaos strikes again

Carbon credit, CER, EUA

What a surprise: The free-market-that-is-not-free leaps from one scandal to the next. In a real free market where salesmen sell something real, and buyers buy something they want, people can’t get away with cheating, or not for long.

If someone sold you a bulk carrier of coal, and it turned up empty, you’d notice.

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10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

The mystery deepens — where did that decline go?

Frank Lansner has done some excellent follow-up on the missing “decline” in temperatures from 1940 to 1975, and things get even more interesting. Recall that the original “hide the decline” statement comes from the ClimateGate emails and refers to “hiding” the tree ring data that shows a decline in temperatures after 1960. It’s known as the “divergence problem” because tree rings diverge from the measured temperatures. But Frank shows that the peer reviewed data supports the original graphs and that measured temperature did decline from 1960 onwards, sharply. But in the GISS version of that time-period, temperatures from the cold 1970’s period were repeatedly “adjusted” years after the event, and progressively got warmer.

The most mysterious period is from 1958 to 1978, when a steep 0.3C decline that was initially recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. Years later that was reduced so far it became a mild warming, against the detailed corroborating evidence from raobcore data.

Raobcore measurements are balloon measures. They started in 1958, twenty years before satellites. But when satellites began, the two different methods tie together very neatly–telling us that both of them are accurate, reliable tools.

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10 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

Hide the decline and rewrite history?

Human emissions of carbon dioxide began a sharp rise from 1945. But, temperatures, it seems, may have plummeted over half the globe during the next few decades. Just how large or how insignificant was that decline?

Frank Lansner has found an historical graph of northern hemisphere temperatures from the mid 70’s, and it shows a serious decline in temperatures from 1940 to 1975. It’s a decline so large that it wipes out the gains made in the first half of the century, and brings temperatures right back to what they were circa 1910. The graph was not peer reviewed, but presumably it was based on the best information available at the time. In any case, if all the global records are not available to check, it’s impossible to know how accurate or not this graph is. The decline apparently recorded was a whopping 0.5°C.

But, three decades later, by the time Brohan and the CRU graphed temperatures in 2006 from the same old time period, the data had been adjusted (surprise), so that what was a fall of 0.5°C had become just a drop of 0.15°C. Seventy percent of the cooling was gone.

Maybe they had good reasons for making these adjustments. But, as usual, the adjustments were in favor of the Big Scare Campaign, and the reasons and the original data are not easy to find.

Matthews 1976, National Geographic, Temperatures 1880-1976

The blue line is the adjusted CRU average from 2006

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8.8 out of 10 based on 5 ratings

Deutsche Bank really wants us to trade carbon

Deusche Bank Carbon Counter
Six months ago, Deutsche Bank was overcome with concern about the planet—bless its soul–and launched this 70 ft. vision of climate doom opposite Madison Square Gardens, New York. You can feel relieved. The bank paid for the carbon credits (no doubt through one of its own funds), so the 40,960 low-energy light-emitting diodes are “carbon-neutral.”

Kevin Parker for Deutsche Asset Management said: “We hope with this sign that it is going to foster a sense of urgency about the problem, raise public awareness, create a need for education and really spur a call for action”

Spurring action indeed. “Sign Copenhagen; Sign Cap N Trade; Give us that $2 trillion dollar market based on meaningless paper permits, and funded by consumers everywhere. Please!”

In a more candid moment, Parker said: “Well, what we’d like to see is a price on carbon. That is absolutely foremost in everyone’s minds involved in the climate change debate. The governments around the world have to get on with regulations…”

Yes, the real agenda is the legislation: forced payments from citizens. We all know we aren’t going to see the Deutsche Bank Top-Soil Clock coming soon highlighting the problem of erosion, or the Deutsche Bank Falling Fish Stock Clock…or the Deutsche Bank program to save the spotted quoll.

In a brazen ambit, Parker suggested we all might like to invest more in renewable energy: $45 trillion more (over 40 years), and that’s only going to solve half the problem”. There is no end to the audacity.

Is this anything other than blatant advertising for a Cap N Trade scheme? Ponder if Exxon launched a similar billboard with the “costs” of carbon mitigation, it would be vandalized, scorned, and disparaged even by august associations like the Royal Society.

A NASA official would call for corporate heads to be jailed for crimes against humanity.

It’s ok for bankers managing $695 billion-dollar funds to take sides in a science debate…. That’s not the same as corporations trying to influence policy.

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10 out of 10 based on 7 ratings

Is there any unmassaged data out there?

This is yet another example of things that don’t add up in the world of GISS temperatures in Australia. Previously, we’ve discussed Gladstone and Darwin.

Ken Stewart has been doing some homework, and you can see all the graphs on his blog. Essentially, the Bureau of Met in Australia provides data for Mt. Isa that shows a warming trend of about 0.5 degrees of warming over a century. GISS takes this, adjusts it carefully to “homogenize urban data with rural data”, and gets an answer of 1.1 degrees. (Ironically among other things, “homogenisation” is supposed to compensate for the Urban Heat Island Effect, which would artificially inflate the trend in urban centers.)

To give you an idea of scale, the nearest station is at Cloncurry, 106km east (where a flat trend of 0.05 or so appears in the graph). But, there are other trends that are warmer in other stations. Averaging the five nearest rural stations gives about 0.6 degrees; averaging the nearest ten stations gives between 0.6 and 0.88 degrees.

Mt Isa and surrounds with temperature trends

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10 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

Thai Translation – The Skeptics Handbook

The volunteers keep coming. Please take a moment to appreciate how much work it takes to do a proper translation, to check it, to edit it, and to edit and arrange the artwork. Then take another moment to think of old friends and contacts who might find it interesting, and e-mail it on. Thanks.

The reach of our global human network is changing polls.

Thanks to Weeraboon Wisartsakul for his expertise and patience.

See www.wwisartsakul.wordpress.com for his Thai blog.

Thanks to Jimmy Haigh for the double-checking and help.

Click on the image to download the pdf.

Volunteers have translated the first Skeptics Handbook into German, French, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Turkish, Portuguese, Danish, Japanese, Balkan, Spanish, Thai, Czech and Lao. The second Skeptics Handbook is available in French and Turkish. See all posts tagged Translations.

10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

ABC Chairman says “Let them speak.” Greens say “Nooooo.”

Today the Chairman of “our ABC” (it’s paid for by Australian taxpayers) said the unthinkable.

It’s not that he said man-made global warming was a scam, and he didn’t announce that carbon wasn’t a pollutant; he just asked for journalists to listen to other points of view.

“At the ABC, I believe we must re-energise the spirit of enquiry. Be dynamic and challenging, to look for contrary points of view, to ensure that the maverick voice will not be silenced.”

In a speech to senior ABC staff, he said that climate change was an example of “group-think”, and that they should listen perhaps “to other points of view that may be sceptical.”

Contrary views on climate change have not been tolerated and those who express them have been labelled and mocked.

I’ve been around long enough to know that consensus and conventional wisdom doesn’t always serve you well and that unless you leave some room for an alternative point of view you are likely to go down a wrong track…

These innocuous non-judgemental lines are too far from the doctrine.

Christine Milne of the Australian Greens responded, and in the true spirit of an open democracy and a free press, urged ABC journalists to ignore him. Fully 40% of Australians might be sceptical,* but Christine Milne wants to make sure that information that aligns with their opinions is not represented by our national government-funded broadcaster. Like Clive Hamilton, she hides in the dark… don’t let them speak. Where is the compassion and tolerance the Greens claim to defend? We’ll defend you if you agree with us, but if you come from a different culture (one that respects data more than “doctorates” and logic over bluster), we’ll use every tool at our disposal to suppress you.

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9.7 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

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Himalayan glaciers on show

Spiegel online

GreenLeft, 3000 years behind the scientific times

Greenpeace is coming: “We know where you live.”