http://joannenova.com.au/

Peter Doherty responds in The Australian but science is not done by committee

There’s a letter in the paper today in response to my article:

Climate scientists are not failing to convince others

From: The Australian
August 27, 2012 12:00AM

Every significant science academy supports the case made by the climate science community. These academies encompass the full spectrum of science and members are elected by merit.

As a researcher in immunobiology, I watch the climate field from the sideline, go to some seminars, talk to scientists, monitor key websites and read leading journals such as Science and Nature.

Climate researchers are rigorous and conservative, and I don’t see anything that gives me unease. The Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO, for example, input 50,000 pieces of new data every day. These are the people who dedicate their lives to grappling with the massive experiment we’re doing with our atmosphere. Unlike my field, this is an experiment that can never be repeated.

Peter C. Doherty, Medical School, University of Melbourne, Vic

My point was that argument from authority is not science, and Doherty’s response is to argue from authority.

One of the reasons “Argument from Authority” is a fallacy is because people are human, and associations of humans don’t always neutralize our failings, sometimes they magnify them.

Yes, science academies and science associations do support the “consensus” – but none of those agencies asked for their members to vote, and none have hosted a public debate. The academies may pretend to represent 50,000 members, but the committee that declares the official position may have only eight members. Members of many of these associations are resigning or launching revolts in protest at the slipping, or non-existent scientific standards in relation to pronouncements on climate science. Nobel Prize winner, Ivar Giaever resigned from the American Physical Society, over 80 prominent physicists petitioned the APS , Steven J. Welcenbach resigned in disgust from the American Chemical Society (ACS) saying “ACS has died as a scientific society. ”

While science funding comes from government and science funding bodies are controlled by warmists, how can you expect any science academy or association to say that the CO2 theory is bunk?

The Royal Society made pronouncements on climate science that so outraged its membership that for the first time in history members rebelled, with 43 calling in a private petition for The Royal Society to rewrite it’s position, which it subsequently did. While the protest came from only a small group within the membership, it’s telling that it was arranged by an email, and two-thirds of those approached signed the petition. The dissatisfaction was widespread.

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Rating: 9.2/10 (96 votes cast)

Jo Nova in The Australian: Manne is anti-science on climate

I’m published this weekend in The Australian (building on the post I did previously here. Manne himself popped in there to tell us “Deniers Hunt in Packs” — demonstrating his true depth of insight into the libertarian independent psyche — a group defined by it’s non-pack nature.)

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Manne declares that the “Denialists are Victorious” (in The Monthly, August 2012) but his sole reasoning that the victorious are “deniers” is merely that some chosen experts tell us a disaster is coming and he feels they could not possibly be wrong. Argument from authority is a fallacy known for 2,000 years, and it is a key point, it is the disguise of the witchdoctor — “Trust me, I am the chosen one”. The one defining difference between science and religion is that the devout can argue from authority, but the scientific cannot. In science there are no Gods and there is no Bible — what matters is the evidence. The highest experts may declare the world is headed for catastrophe, but if 3,000 thermometers in ocean buoys disagree (and they do: see “Argo”), the scientist questions the opinions and goes with the observations.

Robert Manne thinks internet surveys of scientists are a valid way to test whether planetary atmospheric dynamics is changing in dangerous and unprecedented ways. It’s an anti-science position. Since the dawn of time tribal witchdoctors have been forecasting storms and asking us to pay tribute to their idols. Discussion of climate science has descended into abject farce.

To understand the danger of quoting surveys of scientists, let’s look at the three Manne names.

The first (Anderegg) is a blacklist of “good guys” and “bad guys” in the world of science. It doesn’t measure the climate, but it is a reasonable proxy for government grants. Just add up the salaries of all the believers vs the unconvinced and the ratio would be similar. The US government bestowed $79 billion (1990 – 2009) on scientists who looked for a crisis, but very little on those looking for natural causes or holes in the theory. It is a non-event of no proportions that there are more believers publishing papers than skeptics, and the ratio is similar to the funding (though quite a few skeptics manage to publish despite having no tenure, no staff, and no easy access to data.) The number of papers tells us nothing about the quality of the research, it’s not that hard to write papers that are largely irrelevant or repetitive, or the output of another flawed climate simulation.

His approved “climate scientists” might as well be a list of anointed preachers of the Cult of Climate Science. The esteemed?

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Rating: 9.0/10 (128 votes cast)

I feel sorry for ABC listeners, they have no idea what’s going on

Australia’s politics is boiling at the moment, but you’d barely know if you got all your news from the Love Media ABC.

Yesterday in a long press conference our Prime Minister was finally forced to address “questions” that have been burning across through the net.

I heard our Perth ABC drive time presenter Geoff Hutchison discussing this at length yesterday, and in that time I heard all the ad hominem answers the Prime Minister gave, and how well she gave them, and how powerful she sounded. I’m now full bottle on all the names she calls the malicious misogynist nut jobs and how they will not accept any answer or any evidence. I heard that The Australian has apologized. Apologized! And then I heard that again. Twice? It must be significant. I also now know that Larry Pickering is bankrupt (though I can’t quite see what that has to do with running our country).

I did not hear what The Australian apologized for, which was strange, because the tone of voice conveyed that it was an important and unusual event. (Apparently, it appears The Australian said it was a “Trust” which is, go figure… defamatory. Accurate reporters should have used her term: a slush fund.)

I did not hear what allegations were made online about the Prime Minister, or even what questions she was answering. But I heard that “some sections of the media” were running with these old claims (whatever they were).

Regular ABC listeners would have no idea what’s being discussed by a growing slab of the Australian population. Just like they were baffled when former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was “suddenly rolled”. Didn’t see that coming? Really.

Some ABC listeners wouldn’t have a clue why 65% of the population don’t vote Labor.

The worst thing is I get the feeling that some ABC listeners do “know” — they know that those who don’t agree with them are stupid.

“They’re misinformed by the Hate Media.”

Blind love breeds hate

The Love Media keep their listeners in the dark, and breed more hatred and contempt than the Hate Media could. They breed hatred from the ignorant towards a mythical beast, and they alienate those informed of both sides of the story by suppressing their views and by calling them names.

ABC listeners wouldn’t know there is a house-sized amount of money missing from a union of workers. Julia Gillard strenuously denies she did anything wrong, but once she realized something was wrong, what exactly did she do to right the wrongs, and recover the funds stolen from workers? If she’s the innocent victim — as a naive 30 something legal partner having an affair with a deceptive boyfriend — why won’t she call a Royal Commission, clear her name and track down that misused money? To say nothing of union corruption and the methods by which the money was obtained in the first place…

Let’s try to imagine what the ABC would say if opposition leader Tony Abbott had been involved directly in a situation where workers funds had gone missing, if he’d set up an account for “worker safety” for a union (but didn’t tell the union or the law firm he worked for), and later described that same account as a “slush fund”.

Pickering is blistering today asking 24 questions you won’t hear on the ABC.

Bolt: The AWU scandal – Brilliant, except for the bit about the real issue. “It’s a media masterpiece.”

Shane Dowling at Kangaroo Court has been drilling through this for a year. A reader, Keith, suggests this link:http://www.kangaroocourtofaustralia.com/julia-gillard-bruce-wilson-awu-fraud-page/

Douglas sends in a link to watch Julia Gillard answers (ABC): http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-08-23/gillard-responds-to-false-defamatory-accusations/4218242

Rating: 9.0/10 (81 votes cast)

John McLean – ENSO drives sea surface temperatures on the Great Barrier Reef

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg wants us to consider putting sun shades over the Great Barrier Reef, but it begs the question — how much is the reef heating up, and how sure are we that it’s man-made and not natural?

John McLean digs into the data and finds that temperature variations on the reef appear to be closely tied to the ENSO cycle, and that there is little reason to think our SUVs and coal fired plants have anything to do with the rises and falls.

We wonder, as usual, why those paid by taxpayers can’t do the same basic calculations and graphs that the volunteers do online.

Great Barrier Reef sea temperatures – What the data says

John McLean

Inspired by the absurdity of putting shades on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), I studied the observational data.

We can extract data for the grid cells that cover the reef from NOAA’s “Optimal Interpolation” sea surface temperature data (see here). When that data is averaged across the entire reef we find that the average sea surface temperature along the Great Barrier Reef has an annual cycle very similar to that of Willis Island, a Bureau of Meteorology observation station on an island near the middle of the reef. Sometimes the sea surface temperature is slightly higher than Willis Island and sometimes it’s slightly lower. The trend since 1982 for both is around one degree/century, but if we look at the Willis Island trend since 1940 it’s almost flat, amounting to around 0.1C/century. The rise in the trend since 1982 is interesting but there’s more to it than you might imagine.

Using the average temperatures across the entire reef we can establish a 25-year average for each calendar month (1982-2006) and from that calculate the anomaly in each month of each year. That monthly anomaly is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1- Monthly sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies for the GBR since 1982

At first glance that graph suggests a warming in recent years but before we rush to claim it is due to human activity, as Hoegh-Guldberg did, it’s worth comparing to the major climate force in that part of the world, the El Nino Southern Oscillation (aka the ENSO). It’s a force that’s existed for more than 125,000 years and it as a known influence on temperatures around much of the world, so maybe it’s the cause of the variation in sea temperatures on the Great Barrier Reef.

The drivers of the ENSO are still in dispute – the latest CSIRO marine climate report lists six candidates and I know of at least two others – but the situation is easily characterised. During neutral conditions easterly winds blow across the Pacific and warm water is found at the west side. During El Nino conditions the winds decrease or even cease and the warm water is found in the centre of the Pacific, typically at the intersection of the equator and international dateline, and incidentally very close to the Pacific Warm Pool mentioned above. During La Nina conditions the winds are stronger than normal and temperatures in the west are above normal. It’s no wonder that El Nino events are often followed quickly by La Nina conditions; the warm water from an El Nino shift west with the wind.

This is a slightly simplistic description because the ENSO doesn’t switch between three distinct states but is a continuous range of conditions over which arbitrary thresholds have been applied to divide the range into three states.

We measure the ENSO using the Southern Oscillation Index, with a sustained period (typically 3 months) above 8 regarded as a “La Nina” event and the same length of period below -8 being regarded as an “El Nino” event.

What’s ENSO got to do with the Great Barrier Reef?

The reef is west-southwest of the Pacific’s centre and that means under normal conditions the reef water will be warm and the winds predominantly easterly. Under El Nino conditions the reef water will generally be cooler because there’s little inflow of warm water and the water had will cool by evaporation and convection. With La Nina conditions the heat from the east is greater than usual and Great Barrier Reef sea surface temperatures rise.

Figure 2a – Monthly SST anomaly and SOI 1982-1996. Note the correlation between changes in SOI and temperature at the major shifts

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Rating: 8.7/10 (37 votes cast)

Prof Antonino Zichichi (of anti-matter fame) is angry at climate science

You may not have heard of the World Federation of Scientists – it certainly isn’t run with a budget of millions or a professional PR team, instead it’s exactly the kind of organization that outstanding scientists would set up. No flash graphics, no spiffy logo, and no inundation of press releases. It’s only got two colours, but the people who meet and talk there range from world leaders in politics to people who changed the modern world with their science.

It’s the opposite of UN “science”, what it lacks in marketing skills, it more than makes up for in sheer heavyweight scientific brainpower and kudos. The Federation has 10,000 scientist members apparently, including T. D. Lee (parity violation, the Lee Model, particle physics, Nobel Prize) and Prof Antonino Zichichi (1000 papers in particle physics, first example of antimatter). Former members (until their deaths) were Laura Fermi, Eugene Wigner (Nobel in Physics fundamental symmetry principles), Paul Dirac (Nobel Prize, Dirac Equation, Fermions, theoretical physics, “genius”), and Piotr Kapitza (Soviet scientist, Nobel Prize and superfluidity, “Kapitsa resistance“).

Prof Antonino Zichichi founded the World Federation of Scientists and he’s angry at the state of Climate Science.

Christopher Monckton writes from the World Federation of Scientists in Erice Sicily.

President Vaclav Klaus’ delivered the keynote address to the Federation is (see here).

Professor Antonino Zichichi, one of the world’s top six particle physicists (he discovered a form of anti-matter 40 years before the multi-billion-dollar Large Hadron Collider did), is the most famous Italian scientist since his hero Galileo. He founded the Federation half a century ago and, at the age of 83, is its president to this day.

Nino looks like a proper scientist. Imagine giving his friend Albert Einstein an electric shock, and that is what his hair looks like. He is fitter than me and attributes his good health to walking an hour every day, not drinking alcohol and not eating lunch (that’s for wimps). He lives in a medieval stone house in the unspoiled, monastic village of Erice, Sicily, perched high on a 2,500-foot crag overlooking the blue Mediterranean.

He is an angry man. Angry because he, like me, was brought up in the Classical tradition, which insists that the duty of every “seeker after truth” (Al-Haytham’s beautiful phrase for the scientist) is to be logical and rational. He founded the Federation at the height of the Cold War to remind scientists of their moral responsibility to use their craft for good, not for ill, and of their intellectual obligation to adhere rigorously to the scientific method.

Nino is furious at the politicization of climate science. Science these days is a monopsony. There is only one paying customer: the State. Scientists increasingly produce the results their political paymasters want rather than seeking after truth.

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Rating: 8.9/10 (89 votes cast)

Big Green Machine – GE makes $21 billion a year on “clean energy”

GE — A clean energy revenue machine

GEis so large that its annual revenue ($150 billion) is greater than New Zealand’s gross domestic product ($140.43 billion). But GE stands to profit in solving man-man global warming, whereas New Zealand will just pay.

In 2011 GE generated $21 billion in “clean energy revenue”. (GE Annual Report 2011, p 3).

GE boast that their “technology helps deliver a quarter of the world’s electricity”. “We are one of the largest clean energy companies in the world” (page 18) “GE wind turbines, among the most widely used in the world, will soon power the largest wind farm in the U.S ”

Not just a whitegoods company any more.

In other words, they are one of the largest companies in the world which makes profits that depend on a climate of fear. How much would their wind turbines be worth if western governments pulled the pins on all the subsidies?

Here’s how much:

“Manufacturers of turbines and other components will shed an estimated 10,000 workers in the U.S. this year in anticipation of a slowdown in orders, says the AWEA. If Congress doesn’t extend the production tax credit, that figure will hit 37,000 next year—about half the industry’s workforce. The incentive, first offered in 1992, grants owners of wind farms a credit equal to 2.2¢ per kilowatt-hour for electricity produced over a 10-year period. Extending the break for just one more year would cost $4.1 billion in forgone tax revenue over a decade,…” [Businessweek, June 7th 2012]

GE explain that they are concerned about the environment.

“The US industrial and financial conglomerate said it had long seen climate change as a valid concern after an internal evaluation of the scientific case in 2005.” The Financial Times

Notably, GE entered the industry through the acquisition of Enron Wind in 2002. Did it buy into the market before it “bought” into the science? Who knows?

“We found enough data there to have a company like GE respond and we have responded,” said Mark Vachon, head of the“ecomagination” sustainable business initiative GE launched in that year. He said revenues generated by operations in his portfolio now totalled $100bn and were growing at more than twice the rate of those in the rest of the company. The Financial Times

For GE the green revenue stream is growing twice as fast as the rest of the company’s income. No wonder GE is so enthusiastic about the alarming threat of carbon dioxide. It’s a problem that they are being paid handsomely to solve.

Otherwise, it’s been a tough five years for GE: Yahoo finance. No wonder they are promoting the sector that is growing, when so many of their other product lines are shrinking.

Yahoo finance. GE Market cap is roughly $220 billion. (Click to enlarge).

GE stock price would suffer if governments stopped their anti-carbon policies:

Trefis estimates a quarter of the GE stock price is provided by it’s “energy infrastructure” — which is mostly wind turbines, but also some solar panels. GE has a high growth opportunity, apparently, “in the growing European wind energy industry, which has had an average annual growth rate of 15.6% over the last 17 years.”

Other parts of GE are being steered towards green income. “We redeployed capital from NBCU to support $11 billion of Energy acquisitions, which should provide an earnings boost in 2012.” (2011 Annual Report page 4).

GE sponsors and lobbies for Climate and Green projects:

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Rating: 9.5/10 (65 votes cast)

Are they serious? Shade Cloth over the Great Barrier Reef to save it from climate change?

These people are not good with numbers.

In a paper published in Nature Climate Change today, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, together with Greg Rau of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, and Elizabeth McLeod of The Nature Conservancy, say new tactics are needed to save oceans from CO2 emissions.

“It’s unwise to assume we will be able to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at levels necessary to prevent ongoing damage to marine ecosystems,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.

“In lieu of dealing with the core problem – increasing emissions of greenhouse gases – these techniques and approaches could ultimately represent the last resort.”

In addition to using shade cloth over coral reefs, the paper suggests novel marine conservation options, including applying low-voltage electrical current to stimulate coral growth and mitigate mass bleaching; adding base minerals such as carbonates and silicates to the ocean to neutralize acidity; and converting CO2 from land-based waste into dissolved bicarbonates that could be added to the ocean to provide carbon sequestration.

Alistair Hobday Research Scientist – Marine and Atmospheric Research at CSIRO said novel solutions are required. “We need to be mature enough to listen to all sorts of arguments.”

To which Jo Nova, unfunded non government critic said: We need scientists who are mature enough to spot a plan that is bonkers.

The Great Barrier Reef has an area of 348,000 square kilometers. It’s bigger than the UK, Holland and Switzerland combined. So perhaps we could just cover 1%, that’s only three and a half thousand square kilometers and then ask the water to stay in one spot?

The idea apparently is not to drive thousands of pylons into the reef (phew), just to cover “hundreds of square meters” with floating shade material. One wonders how predatory sea-birds will feel about this, not to mention photosynthetic marine life. Air breathing mammals might not “feel right at home” under the shades. (But its not like anyone cares about whales and dolphins right?) Tidal and wave action, with floating material near lots of spiky coral and rocks suggests maintenance could be “expensive”.

The cost? Who knows?

I have no idea what floating shades will cost. It’s probably nothing like land shades, and doesn’t need the poles but will need anchor cables (or there will be a new hazard in shipping lanes). Failing any details, I’ve costed the land sails option here, just for a ball park, give or take $100m (or a billion here and there).

If shade sails on land cost $2,800 to cover 6m by 5m (30 m2), assuming bulk discounts can keep the price the same (even though the installation may be 100km offshore, in salt water, and pounded constantly by waves) that’s only 33,333 shade sails to the square kilometer, at a cost of $93m. All up, covering 1% of the reef (if that were the aim, though it appears not to be that ambitious) is about $300 billion. That’s more than ten times Australia’s annual defense budget. What could possibly go wrong?

The commenters at The Conversation are a case study in why free speech is its own reward. People are volunteering to correct the nonsense put out by paid scientists and paid journalists. It takes months of work to flesh out a really gonzo idea, and yet it takes people five minutes for free to explain the flaws. Why do we spend tax dollars to employ people to be silly? Why didn’t the “editor” run the idea past a skeptic? Why does Nature Climate Change publish this type of material? (And for that matter, when will The Conversation discover that they can add links in their articles?)

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Rating: 9.3/10 (72 votes cast)

Renewable energy is a $250 billion dollar industry that makes about 3% of our electricity

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In June this year the UNEP report announced that Global Renewable Energy investment reached $257 Billion in 2011. It’s so large it rivals the $302 billion invested in fossil fuel power. But how much electricity do we get for all that money? When the details are pulled from the fog, a quarter of a trillion dollars appears to produce only about 3% of all our global electricity, and even less of our global energy. All that money, so few gigawatts.

The 2012 UNEP report “Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment” compares the

“…despite an increasingly tough competitive landscape for manufacturers, total investment in renewable power and fuels last year increased by 17% to a record $257 billion, a six-fold increase on the 2004 figure and 94% higher than the total in 2007, the year before the world financial crisis.”

Renewables growth has slowed somewhat:

“Although last year’s 17% increase was significantly smaller than the 37% growth recorded in 2010, it was achieved at a time of rapidly falling prices for renewable energy equipment and severe pressure on fiscal budgets in the developed world.”

The last couple of quarters have not been good for renewables. (Click to enlarge).

Gross investment in fossil-fuel capacity in 2011 was $302 billion….

So how much electricity does all that investment get us?

At a glance, the numbers in the report look impressive. The UN don’t have much interest in adding graphs like these, though they have 50 figures in the glossy report.

Trick 1, is to refer to “capacity” and not so much to actual production.

- In the power sector, renewables accounted for almost half of the estimated 208 gigawatts (GW) of electric capacity added globally during the year. Wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) accounted for almost 40% and 30% of new renewable capacity, respectively, followed by hydropower (nearly 25%). By the end of 2011, total renewable power capacity worldwide exceeded 1,360 GW, up 8% over 2010; renewables comprised more than 25% of total global power-generating capacity (estimated at 5,360 GW in 2011) …

Source – UNEP: Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2012

The UNEP say renewables comprise 25% of the capacity, and we all know (thanks to Anton Lang) that their capacity is wildly overrated. (Coal fired stations produce at somewhere around 75% of capacity, while solar can be 5 – 20% of its capacity). Capacity is a hypothetical number that is achieved in perfect circumstances. It literally depends on the weather, and when it’s dark and windless, we get nothing from solar and windpower, those moments they are running at 0% of capacity.

Trick 2: When they do refer to production they add hydropower to the renewables “generation”:

…and [renewables] supplied an estimated 20.3% of global electricity.

As we showed with EIA statistics, most of that 20% comes from large scale hydroelectric generation, but most of the renewables investment is going into wind power, and especially last year — into solar. Readers may not realize that while “all renewables” appear to be successful,most renewables contribute next to nothing.

This point is all the most apropros when we look at the value of the investments. Of the $257 billion in renewable investments, a whopping $147 billion was invested just in solar power – the renewable source that generates less than 0.1% of global electricity. And as for hydro — wheres the hydro? There is no large scale hydroelectric power in the $257 billion statistic, even though there is a lot of hydro in the “renewable energy statistics”.

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Rating: 8.8/10 (65 votes cast)

Compulsive namecallers: nutter, conspiracy theorist, anti-semitic, denier — trying to censor through denigration

Got no evidence? Can’t hold a rational discussion? Just call people names — smear them.

David Evans (my other half) pointed out that anyone who opposed the regulating class gets called a racist sooner or later (see those quotes at the end). Now it’s happened to him. Two weeks after getting a mention of climate “feedbacks” into The Age, he’s being called antisemitic. And on what basis? Wait for it… two years ago, on a different topic, Dr David Evans wrote the word “Rothschilds”. Then those who can’t think, but were keen to do a character assassination, leapt to use their psychic abilities, crack secret codes, and drew on their best kindergarten reasoning to call that “antisemitic”. The essay was about banking history and systematic flaws in our currency system, and there was no mention of any religion or any race. But no matter, it’s just another variation of the pathetic Holocaust denier meme. It’s what a smear-artist does — denigrate speakers to try to stop people hearing their message.

As usual, a lack of evidence doesn’t stop the rabid conspiracy-theory-spotters from writing reams of speculation about something that isn’t there and never was. David has never mentioned anything about a Jewish conspiracy, never even alluded to it, and of course, neither have I, nor would we.

Here’s the “chain of reasoning” (I’m using the term loosely):

Are the climate models exaggerating the feedbacks? –> David Evans said “Rothschild” once –> Other unrelated people who talk about the Rothschilds are nutters –> some nutters are anti-Semitic –> therefore, ergo, the models are right and Earth’s climate sensitivity is 3.3C with a feedback loop gain of 0.65!

Who knew? Anyone who writes about monetary history apparently can’t mention “Rothschild” without it neutralizing not only what they say on economics, but every word they utter on every other topic. Which is bad news for Niall Ferguson. He not only mentioned the Rothschilds, I’ve just discovered he wrote two whole books on them (Vol I and Vol II).

Not to state the bleeding obvious but you can’t discuss monetary history without the Rothschilds getting a mention.

Can we train a smear-merchant to think?

Who can say whether compulsory name-calling is deliberate or involuntary? Some people just don’t seem to be able to help themselves. For gullible followers of authority, everything in the world is assessed according to who they can “trust” to do their thinking for them – and given how badly they reason, it’s probably not such a bad strategy. You know: Is the climate warming? – Can I see your CV? But somewhere a minor mental handicap ends up being a modus operandi, and these activists become character-hackers. They spend hours hunting through biographies, looking for “reasons” to denigrate, smear or mock. Can they defame without achieving “defamation”, if you know what I mean?

We just wish they’d spend half the time looking at evidence that matters, satellites, radiosondes, stuff like that.

For the character-hacker, namecalling is a way to stop intelligent conversations. Did the Basel II accords increase monetary aggregates? Ooh Ooh they snort condescendingly — don’t listen to him — he’s a “&*$%&@!” (….insert evil flaw here).

Rhetorically, most of their argument (and there is only one) boils down to declarations of victory: “bwhahhahaha! LOL!”

No evidence or reason needed. It’s a bluff.

Can we train a smear-merchant to think? No. But we can help teach good people to ignore them.

Professors who think baseless smears are evidence?

What is unnerving is how far this simple strategy of audacious bluster goes in terms of impressing those high up in the pecking order. How could any school teacher be fooled by the teenage tactic? Well, lo and behold the marvel of higher education. What does being a “professor” mean when crude tricks are copied by people who ought not just to see through them, but to be able to train the next gen to figure them out too? People like, say “Professor” John Quiggin, member of Australia’s Climate Change Authority, and Prof of economics somewhere in Queensland. He was trying to have a discussion about climate science with a blogger (Sanjeev Sabhlok), and “thought” (I’m being generous) that an anonymous guy’s definition of a man with six degrees as a “certified conspiracy theorist/ antisemite/ tin foil hat/ nutter” neutralized the evidence from 3000 ARGO buoys and such like, and was worth emailing it as if it proves something about the climate.

Now neither of David nor I have had the pleasure of meeting Sanjeev, (we’d never heard of him just like he’d never heard of us). But we’d like to meet him now. His response to Quiggan says it all. Quiggan figures no one even needs to discuss the points David raised … because David is “a fraud and a liar” and “antisemitic” too.

Sanjeev bats it back on his blog:

“… if anyone knows who is this evil monster known as David Evans, please let me know. It may seem strange, but I’ve now got a feeling that anyone attacked by John (like Donna Laframboise) is likely to be an outstanding human being.

For instance, there is NO JOURNALIST in the world who has investigated IPCC more thoroughly than Donna. She is the world’s best investigative journalist. Or close to the world’s best. Yet, John called her a liar (before he then retracted but called her analysis amateurish).

Given John’s track record, it is quite possible that David Evans will turn out to be a brilliant nice man. I have no interest in David Evans, but given John’s charges, I might as well find out more. If he is anti-Semitic it won’t change his science (or my opinion of his science), but at least I’ll know that the science is being served to me by an evil man.”

Being a target of a smear-campaign is becoming something to brag about. ; -)

To answer your question Sanjeev, Dr David Evans is a world leading carbon modeler with six higher degrees in maths and stats, three from Stanford. He duxed Sydney Uni engineering, is doing maths research, spent 5 years at the Australian Greenhouse office and makes it possible for his wife to spend far too long on a computer in a quest to stop cheats and parasites from getting away with a rort. (Can’t everyone see the billions of dollars circling through this “crisis”?)

Does David’s stellar career make him right? No. But it means he’s worth listening to.

David predicted that they would do this, and the character-hackers performed exactly on cue:

“Annoy a member of this class sufficiently to strip away their veneer of politeness, and soon you will be called an “idiot” and eventually a “racist”.”

“If you oppose the regulating class, you will get called an “extremist”, a “nut”, a “conspiracy theorist”, “right wing”, and every variation of “stupid” and “ignorant”, irrespective of the merits of what you say. Say anything that mentions or might imply race and they will also call you a “racist”.”

The most cowardly defamation artists write anonymous blogs — presumably they aren’t proud of what they write, they know their reasoning is bogus, and their modus operandi is equivalent to the schoolyard bully. They don’t want their normal careers muddied with their transparent attempts to stop people having a reasonable conversation.

For the record, for what its worth (which is not much) one of my lifelong best friends is Jewish – I learned to cook Kosher, and how to keep Shabbat, and I’ve been a welcome guest in Jewish abodes in New York, London, Melbourne and Perth. And what has that got to do with anything?

How much electricity do solar and wind make on a global scale? Answer: “Not much”

Simple numbers are hard to get, so when Anton Lang pointed me at the EIA site (U.S. Energy Information Administration), I wanted to give everyone the straight answer to the question: just how much electricity do renewables make on a global scale? The EIA has the only database in the world with a this much accuracy.

The answer is that 80% of our electricity comes from the fossil fuels and nuclear that the Greens despise. Hydroelectricity, with all its pluses and minuses, produces a serious 16% of the total. But all the vanity renewables bundled together make about 3.5% of the total.

Wind power is a major global industry but it’s only making in the order of 1.4% of total electricity. And solar is so pathetically low that it needs to be bundled with “tidal and wave” power to even rate 0.1% (after rounding up).

For all the fuss and money, if the world’s solar powered units all broke tonight, it would not dent global electricity production a jot.

No one connected to a grid would notice.

Global electricity generation by source 2009, pie graph

…

These are the total global numbers from the US Energy Information Agency (The EIA) for 2009.

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Rating: 9.3/10 (68 votes cast)

Climate Evangelism: The Priestess Oreskes warns of the Evil Fox!

Naomi Oreskes visited Curtin University in Perth last week. Blessed are those who came to bear witness to the true prophecies! Dr Roberto Soria from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, was there at what he so aptly describes as an evangelistic event. His dry satirical report of that day follows, a very enjoyable read for those who have been at the receiving end of similar sermons. Frankly, I can’t think of a better way to absorb the Oreskes message. Enjoy! — Jo

Naomi Oreskes preaches hatred of sinners

The Parable of Oreskes is epic!

Guest Post Dr Roberto Soria
The glorious banquet is coming to an end. For 150 years hundreds of millions of guests have eaten to their hearts’ content at the Banquet of Gaia. But now, the Son of Man has arrived to deliver the bill. The diners are in shock. Some begin to deny that this is their bill. Others deny that there even is a bill. Still others deny that they partook of the meal, or suggest that they simply ignore the waiter. But there is no way out. The bill is due now, it is time to pay, or we shall be cast into outer darkness, where there shall be weeping, floods, droughts, acid rain, ozone holes and gnashing of teeth.

“…a chap with a CSIRO badge intervened with the zeal of an evangelic preacher … trying to save me.”

This was the gist of the legend with which The High Priestess Naomi Oreskes, bishop in the holy church of global warming, chose to start her sermon at Curtin University’s Sustainability Policy Institute last Thursday. She had just flown to Perth from the US to warn us against the use of fossil fuels, and to sell her book. As John 1:5 says, “the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not”. Rev Oreskes’s book is trying to explain why, precisely, the darkness does not comprehend the Truth of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change (CAGW).

The answer is simple: the forces of evil are at work, day and night, to suppress the Truth, and she is trying to expose all that. The Devil, in this case, is a complex conglomerate of tobacco and fossil fuel industries, run by all-powerful, rich white males, driving Western capitalist economies. They are responsible for the continued existence of Sin in the City of Man. There is no greater Sin, no worse thoughtcrime in the CAGW church than for a scientist to deny or even doubt or discuss the truth of CAGW itself. There are different types of sinners, Rev Oreskes explained, perhaps destined for different circles of hell. There are scientists directly paid by the Devil. Others who are driven by visceral ideological anti-communism. Others (mostly white, old, male) who participated in the Manhattan project and think they are still fighting the cold war. Others who are simply compulsive liars. Others who still think the earth is flat or continents do not move. Others who have such a bloated ego to believe that their own rational judgement can trump the revealed consensus Truth. And others who are sad, lonely weirdos who are just trying to attract attention because nobody talks to them. Hate the sin, love the sinners, Christian theologians say; but the impression left on me by Rev. Oreskes’s acerbic, humourless sermon, delivered in a whiny American twang, is that she hates the sin and hates the sinners even more.

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Rating: 8.9/10 (118 votes cast)

Thompsons Update – looking for work in the US, and pursuing DEC legally in Australia

Matt Thompson was asked for an update from a local reporter in West Australia, and sent this today:

Thank you for your enquiry. We believe that we were treated extremely unfairly by DEC. Through draconian licence restrictions, they made it impossible for us to continue operating Narrogin Beef Producers, after we had received all the required permissions and gone through all the proper processes before and during operation of the feedlot.

We were also in a dispute with NAB over their involvement in destroying our company. About a month ago, we reached a settlement with the NAB which included giving them possession of Narrogin Beef Producers’ physical assets. We still retain the right to sue the State over the destruction of our business, which we are still pursuing. This is our only means of attempting to repay unsecured creditors.

We are interested to see who ends up in possession of our former assets, as these assets would have no value unless the new owners are treated differently by DEC than we were. We remain deeply saddened by the destruction (including abattoirs) of the beef industry in WA, which showed such promise a few years ago. This senseless economic destruction has ruined many people’s lives and was caused by some very ruthless people.

We send our kind regards and sincere appreciation to the many good people of Western Australia who worked with us and for us on our project and who traded with us. We remain determined to fight for justice in this matter for them and for us.

Kind Regards,

Matt Thompson

Matt W. and Janet H. Thompson
San Angelo, Texas

Matt and Janet are in Texas and looking for work, and willing to move. If anyone knows a business looking for someone of the utmost honesty and integrity, with initiative and an impeccable work ethic, either of them would be an absolute asset. (I’m thinking: management, policy, agriculture, business). They are people who get-things-done, sensible, smart, personable, likeable, and easy to work with. Knowing this couple well, I can vouch in full for their upstanding trustworthiness and jack-of-all-trades capability. Ask me for more details: (joanne AT joannenova.com.au), or email Matt at mattjanet AT suddenlink.net.) Somewhere out there in the US is a business, institute, or organisation that really needs a quality employee…

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Rating: 9.4/10 (67 votes cast)

Zebra Fish like it warm – they swim faster and adapt even better to climate change

Experiments with Zebra Fish show that if their embryo’s develop in warmer water, they not only are able to swim faster but they cope better in both warmer and colder water. (How catastrophic can that be, I ask you?)

ScienceDaily (Aug. 14, 2012) — New research by McMaster University biologist Graham Scott suggests that growing up at warmer temperatures helps some aquatic animals cope with climate change, raising questions about the limits of adaptation.

Scott and Johnston found that when embryos raised in warm water experienced temperature variation as adults, they could swim faster, their muscle was better suited for aerobic exercise, and they expressed at higher levels many of the genes that contribute to exercise performance.

The improvements were true for the adult fish in warmer and colder water alike — a finding that surprised the researchers.

“We thought that they might do better under warmer conditions because they grew up in warmer conditions. We didn’t think they’d also do better under colder conditions, but they did.

Their research shows the fish are hardier after being raised in a warm-water nursery, and raises the question of how far the temperature can rise before the advantage becomes a liability, as inevitably it will, Scott says.

The question then for Zebra Fish lovers is to ask what we are doing to stop the world cooling? Clearly a cooler ocean is a threat to their health and welfare. We simply can’t allow those baby fish to develop in water that is not warm enough for them to reach their full potential.

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Rating: 8.9/10 (34 votes cast)

Models get cloud feedback wrong, but only by 70W/m2 (that’s 19 times larger than the CO2 effect)

Yet another paper shows that the climate models have flaws, described as “gross” “severe” and “disturbing”. The direct effect of doubling CO2 is theoretically 3.7W per square meter. The feedbacks supposedly are 2 -3 times as strong (according to the IPCC). But some scientists are trying to figure out those feedbacks with models which have flaws in the order of 70W per square meter. (How do we find that signal in noise that’s up to 19 times larger?)

Remember climate science is settled: like gravity and a round earth. (Really?)

Miller et al 2012 [abstract] [PDF] find that some models predict clouds to have a net shortwave radiative effect near zero, but observations show it is 70W per square meter. Presumably, cloud shortwave radiative effect means the sunlight bounced upwards off the surface of the clouds and out into space.

What’s especially interesting about this paper is the level of detail. They test shortwave and longwave radiation, precipitation flux, integrated water vapor, liquid water path, cloud fraction, and they have observations from the top of the atmosphere and the surface. With so much information they can test models against short wave and long wave radiation, to see how well the models are really simulating clouds.

We can also see how four models appear to do well on one parameter, only to invariably fail on another. It is easy to see how a not-so-diligent researcher could “verify” some aspect of each and every model but without testing and comparing all the aspects, these single point “successes” are meaningless.

Critics will say this study was just one year in one region (2006 over the African Sahel) but if global climate models don’t understand cloud microphysics and the radiative effect of the condensed water vapor that covers 60% of Planet Earth, then they can’t predict the climate anywhere. And no, the pretense that predicting climate 100 years in advance is somehow easier than predicting a single year is bollocks… 100 years of climate modeling means adding up 100 years of errors. The errors don’t cancel out, they accumulate.

Even though the models are tested below with one year (2006) as the dotted blue line, the blue bands are envelopes of model outputs for 2001-2010, and we would hope that even if the models got the year wrong, the observations would at least fall within the extremes of the decadal predictions, but frequently they didn’t. Indeed the authors note that the decade itself was not that critical saying “virtually the same results are obtained when the GCM solution envelope is stretched to thirty years.”

The four global models tested are: CM2, HADGEM1, CCSM3 & GISS-EH

H/t to the Hockey Schtick

Fig 4: Envelope of maximum and minimum monthly column integrated liquid water path as simulated
by the four GCMs (light blue shading) for the period from 2001 to 2010, the GCM simulated
value for 2006 (blue dashed line), and observations from the AMF1 (red) for months in year
2006.

If the graphs look a bit complex, just focus on the the red solid line — the observations. The blue dotted line is what the models estimate happened, so it’s supposed to be similar. At the very least, the red line ought to fall within that paler blue band called the decadal “envelope”. Where the red line is outside that band it tells us that the observations were outside the full range of what the models expected during the decade.

These are select quotes from the pre-print. (I’ve replaced many acronyms with their full terms to improve readability).

In the world of climate models, clouds without either liquid water or ice can produce “reasonable estimates” of rain.

“A particular focus was placed on the detailed role of clouds and clear-sky in modulating the cross-atmosphere radiative flux divergence in two global climate models that provided the necessary output to facilitate the analysis: CM2 and HADGEM1. Precipitation flux magnitude and wet-season signal shape were deemed superior in GISS537 EH and HADGEM1, but they display inconsistencies in their depiction of cloud microphysics despite their relative accurate depictions of precipitation. For example, GISS-EH produces clouds that are predominantly composed of ice water, which is why so little liquid water is indicated in Figure 4. Ironically, HADGEM1 produces too few clouds and a miniscule amount of total water, which is to say that there is neither liquid or ice in the clouds, yet the clouds produce a reasonable amount of precipitation.”

Hmm, “grossly underestimate”:

“Of the four global climate models, CCSM3 provided the best estimate of cloud LWP, though it significantly overestimated precipitation, while CM2 produced suspiciously large variability in liquid water path (LWP) and GISS-EH and HADGEM1 grossly underestimated the liquid water path.”

A “potentially severe problem”?

“Production and partitioning of cloud water and ice and the generation of precipitation from clouds seem problematic in all four GCMs considered in this study. Insofar as these characteristics are intricately related to radiation throughput in West Africa it seems that this is a potentially severe problem.”

Errors in long wave cloud radiative forcing (CRF) are “particularly disturbing”:

“Both global climate models [CM2 and HADGEM1] struggled to accurately characterize the surface cloud radiative forcing; they underestimated the SW cloud radiative forcing and produced approximately a zero surface LW cloud radiative forcing. This latter comparison is particularly disturbing because the measured surface LW cloud radiative forcing is significant (~30 Wm-2). Intuitively and quantitatively this is an important omission; when humid and cloudy conditions are present, these two GCMs treat LW radiation as if it were dry and clear.”

Then when the models get something right it’s thanks to an error:

“Looking exclusively at the net surface cloud radiative forcing leads to the conclusion that CM2 is quite accurate in its assessment, but measurements show that this agreement is due to error cancellation…”

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Rating: 9.6/10 (67 votes cast)

UWA sponsors world wide junkets for poor research, inept smears: Oreskes

Iwondered who was funding Oreskes to fly all the way around the world to deliver two seminars in Perth to audiences of mostly evangelical believers. Michael Kile (Quadrant magazine) reveals more of the details. Presumably she is funded by the Professors-at-large program at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia (UWA). We still have no details on the amounts.

UWA think achieving “international excellence” is so important they’ve put it in their logo.

…

We see below how many of the UWA hosts benefit from climate change grants, and thus would potentially gain from promoting a baseless smear against critics who threaten their funding or status. These hypocrites are happy to promote the untruth that skeptics are funded to speak, when the they themselves are the ones who benefit financially from a dubious scare campaign. The professors-at-large program is supposed to foster public debate, but four of the ten Oreskes hosts signed a letter seeking to silence a skeptic from speaking at another university.

Who would sponsor an expert that is ignorant of 99.99% of their topic?

Oreskes claims skeptics are funded by big-oil, but misses that most oil companies support alarm, that funding against skeptics is 3,500 times larger, and that she can’t really name any significant money to support her smears (see my post here). She found “millions” in funding to skeptics, but missed “billions” in funding to alarmists. The historian claims to research how extensive funding has distorted the climate debate, yet missed 99.97% of the funding she supposedly studies. She is hardly producing rigorous work, or even doing competent research.

Despite her inept performance, Oreskes has ten “hosts” at UWA. She claims to be an international expert as a “science historian”, but her hosts include just one scientist — Kevin Judd (Mathematics and Statistics), who has received grants for discussing climate models (apparently he’s the kind of statistician who believes it doesn’t matter if thermometers are placed over concrete because “statistics” tells us hot concrete is not warming the thermometer). The other hosts have nothing to do with science or with history:

Stephan Lewandowsky, Psychology (receives grants for namecalling, and finding that unconvinced people are mentally deficient),
Mark Edwards, Business (he writes about sustainability),
Jan Dook, Centre for Learning Technology (Science communication),
Alex Gardner, Law (writes about legal implications of climate change on wetlands and rivers and is also an adjunct professor at ANU in the Australian Centre for Environmental Law).
David Hodgkinson, Law (who writes about climate change law and climate refugees),
Carmen Lawrence, Psychology (former premier of WA, and currently paid to write about changing behavior and “climate change”),
Grady Venville, Education
John Inverarity and Richard Pengelley, St George’s College.

Stefan Lewandowsky will protest that he does “cognitive science“. But his modus operandi is to begin working from a logical fallacy, and everything he does goes downhill from there. A scientist uses logic, but Lewandowsky does not, making “argument from authority” his raison d’etre (all must obey “the consensus”). He is an activist, not a scientist.

UWA aims to stop public debate

The professor-at-large program’s mission is to “stimulate public debate on contemporary issues”. However Lewandowsky was one of the first to sign up to try to stop Christopher Monckton expressing a different view on at Notre Dame University (WA). Furthermore Judd, Edwards and Hodgkinson also signed that list, and apparently would rather sponsor a poorly researched smear campaign than allow a skeptic to speak in public.

Such is the quest for “excellence” in intellectual rigor at UWA these days.

Many of these hosts gets grants for climate change work. Since no one at UWA is paid to be skeptical, there will be few alternate voices at UWA, or at least none with a strong vested interest to speak out. So they will not host an opinion that differs from Oreskes. What we see is how the cancerous growth of one sided “crisis” funding, not only finds a crisis, but directs even more funding to others who come to the same conclusion. It’s a form of funding confirmation bias. Who is financed to audit and expose the fallacies, the poor reasoning and the lack of evidence? No one. Skeptics do it unpaid.

UWA is becoming a leading light in anti-science, and a mockery of free speech. Oreskes parades as a “science historian” yet apparently is ignorant of the largest whistleblowing revolution that has occurred in modern science, not to mention that she doesn’t know that argument from authority is a fallacy, and breaches the basic tenets of science. The scientific method is being scrapped by allowing the Queen of Smear to present her one-sided ad hominem arguments (which miss the main money) as if a cherry picking smear campaign qualifies as scientific history.

If you are an alumni of UWA (like me) and are concerned about falling standards and intellectual rigor there, please leave a comment or email me (joanne AT joannenova.com.au) so I can get in touch. It is time to stop the rot.

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Rating: 9.6/10 (85 votes cast)

The meme spreads: Patrick Moore “gets it”

It’s interesting how the message is spreading. David and I have been arguing for 2 or 3 years that the feedbacks are the key gaping flaw, the critical point in the skeptic’s case. (And see this post last week.) It’s the amplification in the models with water vapor and clouds which is the point of highest uncertainty (and indeed it’s not just uncertain, the evidence points towards negative feedback. The models are wrong.)

Patrick Moore shared emails with David in February 2012 saying: “Yours is the best straightforward explanation of the skeptic’s rationale that I have seen, and thank-you for that.”

And now we see an interview with Patrick Moore in the Washington Times, sharing the meme:

“What most people don’t realize, partly because the media never explains it, is that there is no dispute over whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and all else being equal would result in a warming of the climate. The fundamental dispute is about water in the atmosphere, either in the form of water vapour (a gas) or clouds (water in liquid form). It is generally accepted that a warmer climate will result in more water evaporating from the land and sea and therefore resulting in a higher level of water in the atmosphere, partly because the warmer the air is the more water it can hold. All of the models used by the IPCC assume that this increase in water vapour will result in a positive feedback in the order of 3-4 times the increase in temperature that would be caused by the increase in CO2 alone.

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Rating: 9.0/10 (108 votes cast)

Allegations about our PM raging across the internet around Australia

For the last three months emails have been burning across Australia with links to Larry Pickering. It’s a mark of the times that the ground breaking investigative research and news is breaking through the blog world, and barely touched in the mainstream media (see hereand here as it starts to come out.)

All I will say is that our prime minister, Julia Gillard, strenuously denies any knowledge of illegal activities, but Larry Pickering, a well known national cartoonist, is piecing together allegations (like extortion, misuse of union funds and money laundering) that many Australians will find very interesting: “Our prime minister is a crook” Part I (and “Is our prime minister a crook?” Part II) UPDATE: and now Part III

UPDATE: PART IV (There are two sites to check on, especially if one is down - The Pickering Post and Larry Pickering)

For foreign readers: If the allegations pan out, this could bring down a government and one day may become a case study in the depths of systematic corruption and deceit in Western democracies. It’s a spectacle. If true, it does not get much more sordid than this. To make sense of this you’ll need to know that Julia Gillard is our prime minister and was a lawyer who lived with a top union official called Bruce Wilson in the early 1990′s. AWU means Australian Workers Union.

I don’t feel I have the legal protection to say more at the moment.

Long live the world wide web.

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Rating: 8.5/10 (140 votes cast)

Dr Paul Bain and Nature issue partial correction

It’s a start. Paul Bain regrets the offense caused by the term denier.

But there’s no mention of the term failing basic English or it’s unscientific nature. The term has been used by professors, M.P.’s, Prime Ministers and national broadcasters, and none of them have expressed even a hint of regret, but we can nonetheless call this a small win. Notch up one for skeptics, but ten for the fog.

Credit to Paul Bain for being one of the only people drawn into that unscientific milieu who has the strength of character to back out, ever so slightly. He has promised to reply to my last email. I look forward to it. Few who claim to be concerned about the planet have the intellectual honesty to even try to defend their work.

The small win here is not so much the correction attached below (though that is useful), but it’s that the internet fray and the questions will have been noticed by other editors and researchers. In the future, a few of those people will be more careful with their terms.

Promoting pro-environmental action in climate change deniers

Paul G. Bain | Matthew J. Hornsey, | Renata Bongiorno | Carla Jeffries

Nature Climate Change 2, 600–603 (2012); published online 17 June 2012; corrected online 4 July 2012.

In the above Letter, we used the term ‘denier’ to describe people who are not convinced that anthropogenic climate change is occurring. The denier label refers to an image held by some in the mainstream climate science community that such people are contrarian, which other terms like ‘sceptic’ do not capture. We hoped our findings would suggest to mainstream climate scientists the benefit of looking beyond this contrarian image, by showing that deniers were more supportive of actions to address climate change where these actions produced beneficial social outcomes. However, since publication we were contacted by people offended by the label denier to describe their group due to its broader negative connotations. We acknowledge this point and regret any offence caused.

Sadly we note that even in the correction his present tense use of the term “deniers” shows that he has not yet found any other label to apply to people who are unconvinced that changing light bulbs can significantly affect the global weather. Apparently his mental state still places thousands of eminent scientists in the “denier” box, which surely is a mental disability for any open minded scientist seeking to find the truth.

Note to Paul: So long as you keep thinking of us as “deniers” and talking in the tea-room about “deniers”, you will surely struggle to understand what motivates the group you are paid to investigate who do not deny any observation you can name.

A tad arrogant?

“We hoped our findings would suggest to mainstream climate scientists the benefit of looking beyond this contrarian image, by showing that deniers were more supportive of actions to address climate change where these actions produced beneficial social outcomes.”

Paul Bain is doing his best to be nice but this line translates into saying that mentally-incapable-people who can’t use their frontal cortex are not so bad because they will perform obediently if you convince them there will be “beneficial social outcomes”.

It’s conceited and as insightful as finding that black tea is a shade of brown — which is obvious to billions of tea-drinkers. Likewise it’s obvious to the millions of readers of skeptical blogs that post after post discusses the cost-benefits of green policies. Beneficial social outcomes is what motivates most skeptics and we’ve never tried to hide that.

Indeed, arguably, skeptics and greens have something in common. Presumably many green people think their policies have a “beneficial outcomes” too, it’s just that they aren’t so good with numbers, keep reasoning with fallacies, and don’t test the results. No offense intended of course, I was once a Green, and it wasn’t until someone pointed out there was no direct evidence that global warming is man-made that I looked at the numbers and changed my mind.

In that sense how is a “denier” any different from a “Green”? Answer: the skeptics are not so gullible. It’s harder to convince a logical brain of something which is wrong.

Contrarian? Not so.

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Rating: 9.3/10 (59 votes cast)

Oreskes, the Queen of Climate Smear, ignores the big money, has no evidence, throws names

You’d expect a professor to have done the basic research.

Naomi Oreskes

Naomi Oreskes is famous (of sorts) for the book: Merchants of Doubt — it seeds doubts about skeptics by saying that skeptic’s “seed doubts” about climate change.

The skeptics seed doubts by questioning the evidence and pointing to contrary results (isn’t this known as “discussion”?). Oreskes seeds doubts by digging through biographies, analyzing indirect payments of minor amounts, hunting through unrelated topics and tenuous associations from 20 year old contracts.

The hypocrisy of saying that skeptics attack the messenger is lost on Oreskes who specializes in … attacking the messengers.

Oreskes’ work is based on a logical fallacy, inept research, and incompetent reasoning.

What is remarkable is that so many “intellectuals” or journalists can’t or won’t see through her thin rhetoric.

Oreskes can name virtually no significant funding for skeptics. Skeptics are almost all unpaid volunteers, working out of professional and patriotic duty, appalled by the illogical, anti-science sentiments of people like Oreskes.
The enormous “vested interests” are well over a thousand to one in favor of alarmism as measured by funding, yet Oreskes has not even considered them. The largest proactive skeptical organization (Heartland) has a budget that is one hundredth of Greenpeace and WWF’s combined. Funding for alarmist research since 1990 is at least $79 billion, and probably a lot higher. Funding for skeptical research is so small, no one can add it up. The oil giants like Shell and BP mostly support alarmism and carbon markets. The global carbon market was worth $176 bn in 2011, about the same as the global wheat trade, and the renewables investments added up to $243 bn in 2010. These are very large amounts of vested interest. Since Oreskes is blind to the real money in the debate we can only assume she is an activist rather than a historian.
She resorts to twenty year old documents about tobacco funding to smear by association because she has so little real evidence of actual funding or misbehavior of skeptics. As it happens, Fred Singer was never directly paid by a tobacco company, has never doubted that smoking causes cancer, but corrected a scientific error in a paper on passive smoking. He deserves thanks. Oreskes owes him an apology.
Skeptics far outrank believers in both numbers and in scientific kudos. They have won real Nobel Prizes in physics, the climate scientists Oreskes quotes have won “Peace Prizes”. Skeptics can name 31,500 scientists including 9,000 PhD’s and hundreds of professors. The IPCC can name 62 people who reviewed the critical chapter nine of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, some of them reviewing their own work. Alarmists don’t try to counter the Petition Project with a petition of their own because, even with all their supporters on the scientific gravy train, they don’t stand a chance of coming up with a number large enough to prop up their claims that 97% of scientists agree.
Oreskes claims “deniers” attack the messenger, which on it’s face is true, except that she is the one who denies the evidence and attacks the messenger. She is the Queen of Smear and The Merchant of Doubt herself. Virtually no one has done more to smear opponents in this debate than she has. She refers to them continuously as “Deniers” — though she cannot name any evidence they deny, she has dug mindlessly into the paltry funding, biographies, or association and connections with topics that are totally unrelated to our atmosphere. Skeptics keep asking for evidence. It’s been 30 months since I asked, and no one can provide THAT mystery paper that supports the catastrophic claims.
Oreskes keeps stating that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and increases the temperature of the planet, but almost all the leading skeptics agree with it. Why does she keep stating it, as if it is a point of contention? She wants the audience to believe that this is what the debate is about, while the skeptics agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that causes warming — but dispute the feedbacks asserted by models (which account for two thirds of the forecast increase in temperatures), but which is completely absent in the observations. Is Oreskes ignorant and incompetent in assessing the real scientific debate or is she deliberately deceiving her audience? Only she knows.

When she says those in denial reject “the scientific evidence”, she mistakenly believes that “evidence” about climate change is an internet poll of government funded researchers. It’s an anti-science position akin to witchcraft. Tens of thousands of real scientists, including men who walked on the moon, and Nobel Prize winners of physics, know that evidence for climate change comes from thermometers, ice cores, satellites and fossils. Real scientists can quote 1,100 peer reviewed papers that support their skepticism. Naomi Oreskes can quote no real evidence that supports her catastrophic pet hypothesis. Instead she thinks computer simulations produce “observations” and scientist’s opinions are worth measuring and quoting.

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Rating: 8.9/10 (152 votes cast)

Ray Evans reviews The Denialist Victory

Ray Evans writes a review below of Robert Manne’s essay in The Monthly entitled A Dark Victory: How vested interests defeated climate science. (Forgive me Ray for slipping in one or two thoughts of my own below). Ray Evans is the secretary of The Lavoisier Group one of the first original skeptical groups in Australia (I’ve put a few notes on that at the base of the article). It was Graham Readfearns review (ABC Drum) that apparently brought the Manne article to Ray’s attention.

Dear All,

Readfearn’s review was a lamentation of defeat and disappointment. So I immediately bought a copy of The Monthly and with eager anticipation began to read Robert Manne’s account of the tragedy which he claims has befallen him and his fellow warmists. It was a disappointing read.

There was nothing new in Manne’s arguments seeking to legitimize his passionate belief in imminent climate catastrophe. His palpable anger, bordering on hatred, of the global warming sceptics, or to use his loaded term, denialists, all of whom were Americans, was unsettling.

“While climate change denial . . . exists almost exclusively in the English speaking democracies . . and although it has spread to Canada, Australia and the UK, within the Anglosphere its place of origin and heartland is the US.”

Robert Manne places the sceptical scientists from the US in a political context. He names Frederick Seitz, Fred Singer, William Neirenberg and Robert Jastrow as attached to the Marshall Institute and as “Cold Warriors who had once supported the Vietnam War and the neo-conservative hawkish policies of the early Reagan administration”. As far as I am aware, neither Neirenberg nor Jastrow have played any part in the global warming debate* (See update below).

Richard S Lindzen is undoubtedly the most distinguished scientist within the ranks of the scientifically qualified global warming sceptics. He is Professor of Meteorology at MIT, his publication record is awesome, and his leadership role in sustaining what was originally a small band of scientific brothers (but now much larger) was critical. Robert Manne, although admitting Lindzen’s scientific eminence, then dismissed him as“the fanatically anti-communist Lindzen.”

An important weapon in the warmist armory is the accusation that global warming sceptics are in the pay of the fossil fuel industries; Big Oil is usually cited as the primary villain. The Lavoisier Group whose annual income rarely exceeded $20,000, was routinely dismissed by every Green organisation in Australia as in the pay of the fossil fuel industries. The ratio between the financial resources enjoyed by the warmists (most of their money – including Robert Manne’s salary – comes from the taxpayer) and the sceptics, is at least 100 to 1 [JoNova thinks it's closer to 5,000 to 1]. And yet, despite this huge advantage, despite the enthusiastic support of the chattering class elites who control the ABC, the Fairfax media, the universities, and what is left of the protestant churches, Manne concludes his lamentation with these two sentences :

The long war the denialist movement had fought against science and against reason, in the US and throughout the English-speaking world, has indeed achieved a famous victory. This is a victory that subsequent generations cursing ours may look upon as perhaps the darkest in the history of humankind”

[Darkest in the history of humankind? Deniers are worse than Pol Pot and The Black Plague? -- Jo]

How was this victory possible? There are, in my view, two reasons. The first is mentioned by Manne.

“More importantly, it was becoming clear that the most important effective denialist media weapon was not the newspapers or television but the internet”.

Manne is right here. Just as Gutenberg destroyed the monopoly which the Church had enjoyed for many centuries on publishing the Bible, the writings of the church fathers, and other religious documents, so the internet has destroyed the power which was described in the Climategate emails. This is the power which a small group of people in key institutions such as the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the Hadley Centre at the UK Met Office, and which, across the Atlantic, included James Hansen at NASA, and Michael Mann, now of Penn State University, (but in 2000 at the University of Virginia), were able to wield by excommunicating (to use religious terminology) any scientist who did not subscribe to the warmist doctrines they were promoting throughout the Anglosphere.

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Rating: 9.2/10 (103 votes cast)

Wednesday, 29 August 2012

Blind love breeds hate

What’s ENSO got to do with the Great Barrier Reef?

Prof Antonino Zichichi founded the World Federation of Scientists and he’s angry at the state of Climate Science.

GE — A clean energy revenue machine

GE stock price would suffer if governments stopped their anti-carbon policies:

GE sponsors and lobbies for Climate and Green projects: Keep reading →

The cost? Who knows?

So how much electricity does all that investment get us?

Trick 1, is to refer to “capacity” and not so much to actual production.

Trick 2: When they do refer to production they add hydropower to the renewables “generation”:

Got no evidence? Can’t hold a rational discussion? Just call people names — smear them.

Can we train a smear-merchant to think?

Professors who think baseless smears are evidence?

David predicted that they would do this, and the character-hackers performed exactly on cue:

Other posts about name-calling:

The Parable of Oreskes is epic!

Who would sponsor an expert that is ignorant of 99.99% of their topic?

UWA aims to stop public debate

A tad arrogant?

Contrarian? Not so. Keep reading →

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GE sponsors and lobbies for Climate and Green projects:

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