Tag: AGW/CC

Science commits suicide

This news strikes me as something that could lead to the exposure and eventual defunding of a great deal of the chicanery involved in the “climate science” scam. Only a group of intellectually isolated individuals who highly overrate their ability to influence the public would be so foolish as to transform themselves into political activists this way:

Faced with rising political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The still-evolving efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House in Tuesday’s election.

The ineptness of their strategy is visible in their choice to not only abandon their home turf, but attack the very individuals who are presently providing them with most of their funding. I’m delighted to see it, of course, because it is obvous that their so-called science isn’t actually scientific and this attempt to is only going to lead to more scrutiny and less funding of the global warming gravy train.

Moreover, it will likely lead to a long-overdue diminishing of the public’s respect for science and scientists as the latter reveal their total ignorance of matters they consider to be insignificant such as economics, democracy, and human liberty. Scientists are technocratic totalitarians dependent upon government for the most part; note that both the National Socialists and the Soviet Communists historically enjoyed a good deal of support in the scientific community and few scientists had any qualms about working for such evil masters. [Science fetishists are encouraged to make their usual argument about Lysenko here.] Scientists have their uses, but only a madman or a fool would want to allow them any significant influence in government.

Speaking of climate change and economics, the market has spoken:

Global warming-inspired cap and trade has been one of the most stridently debated public policy controversies of the past 15 years. But it is dying a quiet death. In a little reported move, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on Oct. 21 that it will be ending carbon trading — the only purpose for which it was founded — this year.

Good riddance indeed. As if the global economy isn’t already facing a dauntingly high degree of difficulty.

Global Warming Nazis

I had previously preferred the term “global warming fascists”, but the term simply doesn’t do justice to these twisted, human-hating idealogues.  It appears we may end up eventually having to go to war with the sick bastards should they take over a country or two just like we did with their German predecessors; as with the National Socialists, the global warming extremists genuinely believe that their mad pseudo-scientific myths justify killing people. 

Fortunately, given that their tanks will be solar-powered and their cruise missiles will be launched by turbine windmills, it should take a lot less than five years to defeat them and wipe them out.  And, seeing how they won’t be utilizing carbon anymore afterwards, it will be a win-win.

It’s clear that the pro-warming media has the vague idea that something has gone seriously wrong here, even if they don’t quite understand what the negative reaction is all about.

“While many people said they found the short an amusing way of addressing the issue of apathy towards climate change issues, others found it tasteless and unnecessarily violent.”

Yeah, that was just explosively hilarious, wasn’t it? I mean, about the only thing that would have made it funnier if the self-appointed climate saviors were murdering Jewish schoolchildren… no, make that gay Jewish schoolchildren. Ho, ho, ho.

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.