Tag: AGW/CC

You might want to check that

The claims of average temperatures rising don’t mean a whole lot when the thermometers don’t work:

US Government admits satellite temperature readings “degraded.” All data taken offline in shock move. Global warming temperatures may be 10 to 15 degrees too high. The fault was first detected after a tip off from an anonymous member of the public to climate skeptic blog, Climate Change Fraud

Caught in the center of the controversy is the beleaguered taxpayer funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA’s Program Coordinator, Chuck Pistis has now confirmed that the fast spreading story on the respected climate skeptic blog is true….Great Lakes users of the satellite service were the first to blow the whistle on the wildly distorted readings that showed a multitude of impossibly high temperatures. NOAA admits that the machine-generated readings are not continuously monitored so that absurdly high false temperatures could have become hidden amidst the bulk of automated readings.

In one example swiftly taken down by NOAA after my first article, readings for June and July 2010 for Lake Michigan showed crazy temperatures off the scale ranging in the low to mid hundreds – with some parts of the Wisconsin area apparently reaching 612 F. With an increasing number of further errors now coming to light the discredited NOAA removed the entire set from public view.

I found this level of incompetence a little hard to credit, so I checked the link. Sure enough, here was the message: “NOTICE (8/11/2010): Due to degradation of a satellite sensor used by this mapping product, some images have exhibited extreme high and low surface temperatures. Please disregard these images as anomalies.”

Needless to say, restructuring the global economy on the basis of conclusions drawn from data of this sort wouldn’t be so much stupid as absolutely and certifiably insane. As for the so-called “scientific consensus”, remember two things. 1) Most people are idiots. 2) All scientists are people. Ergo, it is safe to assume that most scientists are idiots, especially when one takes into account their apparent inability to understand either a) that science depends upon capitalist wealth not government largess, and, b) that the basic laws of supply and demand apply to their profession as well as their academic credentials.

Political science

The UK attempts to whitewash Climategate:

The first of several British investigations into the e-mails leaked from one of the world’s leading climate research centers has largely vindicated the scientists involved.

The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they’d seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming—two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.

In their report, the committee said that, as far as it was able to ascertain, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact,” adding that nothing in the more than 1,000 stolen e-mails, or the controversy kicked up by their publication, challenged scientific consensus that “global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity.”…

Lawmakers stressed that their report—which was written after only a single day of oral testimony—did not cover all the issues and would not be as in-depth as the two other inquiries into the e-mail scandal that are still pending.

Translation: we found nothing too terribly damning… mostly because we were careful not to look very hard. Please, please, please be sure to notice all the qualifiers we were careful to insert so we don’t look like we were covering anything up when more in-depth investigations reach opposite conclusions.

The stonewalling didn’t work. Neither will the whitewashing.

Evil Greens

James Delingpole happily shares the results of a recent scientific study on the morality of the environmentally conscious. Or rather, the lack thereof:

Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the “halo of green consumerism” are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. “Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours,” they write.

The pair found that those in their study who bought green products appeared less willing to share with others a set amount of money than those who bought conventional products. When the green consumers were given the chance to boost their money by cheating on a computer game and then given the opportunity to lie about it – in other words, steal – they did, while the conventional consumers did not. Later, in an honour system in which participants were asked to take money from an envelope to pay themselves their spoils, the greens were six times more likely to steal than the conventionals.

It’s hardly surprising. These are the same jokers who completely fail to see anything wrong with the vast AGW/CC scam. They are clearly moral vacuums.

Mailvox: No greenhouse effect

Dominic updates us on the latest AGW/CC-related science:

Here’s a pair of physicists reviewing the issue. Don’t know if you’re aware of this particular paper yet, but it’s certainly blogworthy, at least. They basically prove, using straightforward physics, that there is no such thing as The Greenhouse Effect(TM). Heating in greenhouses is from trapped air, not trapped radiation, thus the idea that trace of amounts of CO2 reflecting solar energy back to the Earth rather than letting it escape the atmosphere causes a rise in temperature is unfounded. The Greenhouse Effect(TM) is a myth.

The physicists couldn’t be much more clear: “There are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse eff ect, which explains the relevant physical phenomena. The terms “greenhouse e ffect” and “greenhouse gases” are deliberate misnomers.”

I can’t say I’m surprised. Since global warming isn’t happening, the mechanisms that supposedly underlie it are presumably false. Notice the charge of “deliberate misnomers”. As with most lies, it’s seldom possible to stop with just one, which is why the truth will usually come out in time. And that’s exactly what is happening with the AGW/CC deception and all of the faux scientific falsehoods that have been used to sustain it.

Lomborg returns fire

Bjorn Lomborg responds to what appears to be an incompetent, would-be hatchet job on his climate books:

Howard Friel’s book The Lomborg Deception (LD) focuses on two of my books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (TSE) and the U.S. edition of Cool It (CIUS). It is heartening to write books that engage others, and I welcome his critique.
Unfortunately, it is obvious that Friel has no interest in fair-minded criticism or honest disagreement. Rather, he seems determined to portray me as devious, deceptive, and intellectually dishonest. Ironically, in his zeal to do so, he repeatedly commits the very sins he accuses me of – selective or incomplete quotation, misrepresentation of source material, and even outright fabrication. Rather than engaging with my books on their own terms, he caricatures my work and then attacks it.

Friel makes his intent clear in an author’s note at the beginning of his book, in which he identifies what he calls “Lomborg’s Theorem”: the idea that “global warming is no catastrophe” (p. xi).1 His aim, he says, is to discredit this idea—“to show that Lomborg’s Theorem is grounded in highly questionable data and analysis, and that there is little if any factual or analytic basis for the theorem” (p. xi). Fair enough. This is the stuff of academic debate: are my data accurate and is my analysis valid? I have no problem with anyone questioning the basis of my work, provided the questions are honest and fair-minded. But as I will document below, what Friel does in The Lomborg Deception is something else entirely. In his attempt to prove that my data and analysis are misleading and/or dishonest, he quotes source material out of context, mangles source figures and tables, misrepresents my text and source material, relies more on news reports than on peer-reviewed research, and consistently avoids engaging with the central arguments of my work.

Having written a book that is a response to the arguments of other individuals, I can testify that it is vitally important to attack the target’s strongest arguments rather than sniping away at the trivial and peripheral issues and attempting to portray them in a false light. The fact that I directly addressed the New Atheists’ most important arguments – Harris’s Extinction Equation, Dawkins’s Ultimate 747, and Dennett’s Division of Doxastic Labor – meant that it was impossible for their defenders to get away with their false accusations of strawmen construction. Not that that prevented a few of the less intelligent ones from trying, of course….

Another reason that it is always a mistake to address the side issues in lieu of the central ones and fail to give your target a reasonable benefit of the doubt is that even when you have correctly addressed the relative trivialities, it is usually possible for people to play the interpretation game in an attempt to circumvent a solid rebuttal. For example, it was only because I directly corresponded with Sam Harris that I was able to explode several excuses manufactured for him by his defenders. In this case, after reading Lombjorg’s response, it would appear that Friel chose rather poorly in selecting a target who is clearly not afraid to stand by his works and present a detailed defense of them.

Just to be clear, I read Cool It and was unimpressed by it, albeit not for the reasons that Friel manufactures. I was unimpressed mostly because it is obvious that global warming is not taking place, therefore Man is not causing it, and I have little interest in the alternative “save people from themselves” schemes which Lomborg would prefer to tax people in order to fund.

There is no global warming. Period.

Don’t believe me? All right, then how about the “climate scientist” who is the point man for the whole AGW/CC charade?

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon. And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming….

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries. But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world. Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. ‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

Got that? There has been NO statistically significant global warming since 1995. Notice that this doesn’t have anything to do with whether it is man-made or not, it simply isn’t taking place! And despite Phil Jones’s belief to the contrary, there is no long-term warming trend either. The debate is over, all that’s left is to clean up the bad science and the vast political infrastructure that was constructed upon it.

This is yet another demonstration that in the absence of real replicable science, a scientific consensus is every bit as intrinsically worthless as a stock market consensus. And, given the fact that – all together now – MOST PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS, any time there is a strong consensus which contradicts the relevant facts and logic, however imperfect they happen to be, the contrarian position is the correct way to bet.

Speaking of which, where did that great horde of inflationistas predicting an imminent dollar collapse disappear to? It would appear they were buried under an unexpected landslide of Greek debt. Who could have ever foreseen THAT coming….

UPDATE – Phil Jones isn’t the only climate scientist in the process of recanting:

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC. The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years. These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

A card falls out of the stacked deck

The whitewashers slip up:

A member of the panel set up to investigate claims that climate change scientists covered up flawed data was forced to resign last night, just hours after the inquiry began. Philip Campbell stood down after it was disclosed that he had given an interview in which he defended the conduct of researchers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), insisting that they had done nothing wrong.

That’s just science at work, right? Because nothing says “science” like the editor-in-chief of Nature being caught out in a lie about his lack of predetermined views on the subject. I am not saying that all scientists are dishonest, corrupt, ideological propagandists, I am merely pointing out the obvious fact that because some of the most institutionally-respected scientists have proven themselves to dishonest, corrupt, ideological propagandists, the logical observer has no choice but to distrust anything a scientist says that is not independently replicable. The fact that one can have reasonable confidence in the scientific method absolutely does NOT mean that it is reasonable to have confidence in the scientist who claims to have utilized it.

And, for the sake of the obtuse scientific illiterati, I will once more point out the important and obvious fact that peer review is not, and has never been, any more intrinsically scientific than white lab coats or being unattractive to women.

No basis in fact

A NASA astrophysicist’s review of the IPCC’s 4th assessment report:

There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact.

Forget science, apparently there is not even “any foundation or basis in fact.” Naturally, this refers to the chapter which is devoted to the anthropogenic part of the AGW/CC facade. But apparently claiming to summarize something “based on” peer-reviewed literature is enough to permit making arbitrary points with no actual basis in fact. Because it’s, you know, science.

Interview with James Delingpole

Vox Day interviewed James Delingpole, the British journalist and author of Welcome to Obamaland: I Have Seen Your Future and It Doesn’t Work, on February 4th, 2010.

When did you first become skeptical about the idea of man-made global warming?

There was no Saul-line moment of conversion, it was a gradual dawning. One thing that the global warming lobby likes to do is to make out that people who disagree with them somehow hate nature and that the reason they object to global warming is not on scientific grounds but because they aren’t prepared to make the necessary lifestyle changes. This is nonsense. In a way, I think my love of nature is the reason I care so much about this battle. For example, the measures adopted by the British government to deal with so-called man-made global warming involve carpeting the most beautiful countryside on Earth with wind farms that are inefficient, can only operate economically if heavily subsidized by the government and therefore the taxpayer, and utterly destroy the landscape. I don’t believe in this thing they call “the precautionary principle” because sometimes doing something can be much, much, much worse than doing nothing.

Historians are aware that Greenland used to be farmed and that the Romans grew grapes in England. Are the global warming scientists historical illiterates or were they just hoping that no one would remember that the world was quite a bit warmer a few centuries ago.

It’s a very interesting question. The first part of the answer is that scientists stick to their particular field. I think what’s happened with some of these climate change scientists is that they’ve been so engrossed in their little corner of the picture that they haven’t bothered to look at the bigger one. And the second part is that in some cases they have actively sought to rewrite history, as in those Climategate emails where you see Michael Mann mulling aloud how he might get rid of the Medieval Warm Period. That’s the kindest complexion one can put upon it. The Medieval Warm Period is an embarrassment to them. The fact is that the majority of scientists in that field agree that during the Medieval Warm Period it was warmer than it is now. There was no industrial civilization then, so how do you explain it? You can see why it’s a huge embarrassment to them. The same applies to the Roman history. They were growing grapes by Hadrian’s Wall.

I think it’s natural to be skeptical of global warming when you come from Minnesota, which was once covered by ice. And of course, around this time of year, global warming sounds pretty good.

There is a very interesting report that was sent to me recently written by one of the numerous lobbying foundations that advises the propagandists of how best to advance the cause of global warming in the minds of the various people around the world. And it said precisely this: in warmer countries it clearly makes sense to talk in terms of global warming. But in other places, where the weather was unlikely to behave in the correct manner, they should call it climate change and be sure to claim that any form of extreme weather event, be it cold or hot, was definitely further proof of this “climate change”. The dishonesty of what is being foisted upon us is extraordinary.

Why did it take so long for the global warming proponents to realize that Climategate was a serious blow to their efforts?

Denial. Denial is the obvious answer. Even now, you’re getting a lot of warmists, particularly the environment correspondents in the mainstream newspapers and at the BBC, they’re kind of finessing their position. They’re preparing their lines of defense. A lot of them are saying things about the recent IPCC revelations like “this of course is much more important than the totally insignificant Climategate emails”. This is a) an attempt to justify how they were sniffy and didn’t report the Climategate emails when they happened, and, b) they want to give their opponents as little ammunition as possible. They want to credit their opponents with as little intelligence or journalistic skill as possible. For me, the significance about the Climategate emails was not due to any new and specific revelations, but that for the first time, we had emails confirming what a handful of journalists and dissenting scientists had been saying for over a decade. You know, that the global warming scientists had been cooking the books and fiddling the data, that they had been suppressing the research of scientists who disagreed with them. All of these things that people had suspected before but never been able to prove were suddenly there. The Climategate emails were the smoking gun.

Do you think we’ve seen the last of the scandalous revelations to come out of the IPCC and the CRU?

No, it’s the gift that goes on giving. First of all, we had Glaciergate, then we had Amazongate, and of course before that we had Pachaurigate. Yesterday we had Hollandgate, where it was discovered that the IPCC report had exaggerated the extent to which lowland Holland is at threat from global warming and exaggerated, by a significant factor, the number of people there who were endangered by flooding being caused by global warming.

When I consider how wildly off these reports have been, I’m beginning to worry that the real danger is being overrun by hordes of ravenous polar bears.

I would think this is almost certainly the case. We’re actually in more danger of being frozen as well.

Copenhagen fell out of the news rather rapidly. Was that the result of Climategate or the economic situation?

I think Climategate had very, very, very little to do with the failure of Copenhagen. The fact is that the policymakers, the NGOs, and the lobbying groups were sitting in a bubble and carried on talking their talk as if nothing had changed at all. The reason that Copenhagen failed was the reason it was going to fail long before Climategate happened. People were talking about it inevitably being a failure and that the policymakers wouldn’t get their act together because the countries could not agree. It was in the midst of a recession.

Why has the international media been so quick to believe the claims of the global warming scientists and why has the British press been more skeptical than the American press?

You need to look at it historically. In the 1990s, there was a general feeling abroad among the chattering classes that they had had it too good for too long. People were enjoying the inflationary boom, the debt-fueled boom, but at the same time, in the way that middle classes do, they were starting to feel guilty about it. Maybe we’ve had it too good for too long. Maybe we should start thinking about more important things than money. And so you had lots of people going organic and talking about ethical lifestyles. This intellectual climate coincided with activists like James Hansen of NASA and Al Gore pushing for this vision of a world that was doomed by Man’s greed and consumption. It hit the spot perfectly. There was the famous conference that Al Gore staged in Washington on the hottest day of the year. They opened all the windows the night before, then closed them in the morning so the air conditioning broke down. Of course, it was sweltering inside as they announced the news that the world was in trouble and it was all Man’s fault. So you had suddenly an exciting story that the newspapers could get their teeth into and it gelled with their chattering class readership. This meme took off very quickly. At the newspapers you also had these environment correspondents, who I think are probably the most partisan correspondents in any genre you can imagine. They were not objective at all. These were environmental activists taking their cue from the propaganda of organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, which is effectively a Marxist revolutionary organization closely associated with people like Maurice Strong, the one-world government guy. So all these activist groups were feeding this information into the newspapers where it was reported uncritically and people read it because it was what they wanted to hear. You had this great big movement going on and no one wanted to say that the emperor was wearing no clothes. Anyone who pointed it out was marginalized.

As for the second part of your question, the grass is always greener on the other side. I don’t think the record of the British press has actually been much better than the American press. You’ve got papers like the Washington Times that’s taken the skeptical position, hasn’t it? I know you’ve got lots of papers like the New York Times pushing the warmist agenda, but if you look at most British newspapers, and also the BBC, you will find that they have been taking the same abject position as most American newspapers, reporting this AGW as if it were indisputable fact and expressly squashing the work of anyone who disagrees with it.

You mentioned the connection of some of the environmental organizations to the one-world advocates. Geoffrey Lean was writing that the idea global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a conspiracy of the world’s scientists and political leaders pushing a one-world agenda is far-fetched. Have the British learned nothing from the example of the European Union? It was always sworn up and down that the European Common Market had nothing to do with politics until it suddenly turned into a political entity?

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he. Listen, why do you think I want to emigrate so badly? It is precisely this. I feel that we are living in an eco-fascist tyranny. Many of us look aghast at what has been done by the European Union. 80 percent of all new laws passed in Britain emanate, not from the British government, but from the European Union. These are laws over which we have no democratic control. The people in the European Union are democratically unaccountable. And unfortunately, AGW is the European Union mark two. It’s no coincidence that the European Union has been pushing the AGW agenda harder than almost any political entity in the world. The reason for that is very simple. As Jonah Goldberg argues in Liberal Fascism, in order for fascist regimes to impose their power on the populace, what they need is an excuse, a crisis so apparently grave that only the most dire and stringent government action is justified. And this action, of course, can circumvent the wishes of the populace. It is perfectly okay for unelected bureaucrats and technocrats to impose unwanted policies on people because the world is doomed and if we don’t do something now, we’ve had it.

I always find this to be an interesting argument in light of the great government successes in eradicating poverty, drug use, and crime.

Exactly, exactly! I despair, I really do, of what’s happening and what’s going to happen. Since November, we have seen AGW unraveling at the most extraordinary rate. What has been the response among our lawmakers and what has been the response at the scientific institutions implicated in these scandals? Why, it has been to close ranks, to cover up, and to pretend nothing has changed as the caravan moves on! In Britain, we have the energy and climate minister, Ed Miliband, and the conservative opposition both saying effectively the same thing. They’re saying we must cut carbon by massive amounts, they’re talking about green jobs and expecting people to believe them! They’re saying this when we know from the evidence of Spain that for every green job created by the government, 2.2 jobs are lost in the real economy. The idea that green jobs are going to bail us out of this economic situation is pie in the sky, it’s Enron accounting.

I have one final question. Why are Guardian readers such wankers?

They are, aren’t they! Actually, having said that, one of my great pleasures in life, one of the few pleasures left for those of us who don’t believe in one-world government, is rooting through the comments below articles written by people like George Monbiot and seeing just how many of them have been censored by the moderators and how many more are antipathetic to George Monbiot’s point of view. What you realize is that certainly out in the blogosphere and on the Internet generally, skepticism is growing. There are a lot of very informed, clever, funny people out there who are saying “we won’t buy this shit, enough is enough!” I’m hoping that this revolutionary spirit that we see on the Internet spreads out into the real world too, because I think the Internet is our best defense against the one-world government tyranny that is being imposed upon us in the name of global warming. This is a battle worth fighting. The future of Western civilization depends on the outcome. I think it’s that serious.

On a tangentially related note, this Audi “Green Police” ad is a timely and light-hearted demonstration of the eco-fascism of which Delingpole is warning.  The ad is funny, but the reality won’t be, if the people of what were once known as the Western democracies are foolish enough to allow it to come to pass.

Research is hard

It appears global warming scientists are even more ignorant than biologists:

The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday…. The spokesman said he regretted the fact that proper procedure was not followed and said it should not be left to politicians to check the IPCC’s numbers. The Dutch environment ministry will order a review of the report to see if it contains any more errors, Vallaart said.

The joke that is AGW/CC just keeps on giving.