I hope Barack Obama has been practising his “walking on water” trick very hard, as it will be expected of him pretty soon when he finally takes office. That’s after he’s cured cancer, fixed up the world’s economy, achieved world peace … and all by March 1st!

What is more, the disappointment will be all the more intense when the US public realises, after maybe a year, maybe less, that he’s not divine, just another human being – a socialist/Marxist human being in fact, who will wreck the US economy, erode freedom of speech in an attempt to appease Islam, and plunge headlong into carbon trading schemes based on smoke and mirrors.

I’m sure I’m not alone in finding the adulation, hero-worship, and the almost religious devotion to the Obamessiah to be way over the top, and I have serious reservations about Obama’s prospects as President. There have been a hell of a lot of empty promises from a man who appears to be the archetypal style-over-substance victim.

And a lot of utter nonsense spouted, especially in relation to “climate change”. By appointing John Holdren (see here), a well known alarmist, as his science adviser, we can see where US policy in that area will be heading during the next four years.

The Age however cannot contain itself and gushes even more praise over “the one” under the headline “World can’t wait for Obama’s new era”, and gleefully trashes George W Bush’s record, describing him as one of the worst US presidents. I’m not even going to quote anything from it – it is nauseating, sycophantic tripe – in other words, typical Age fare.

Read it here (if you dare…)

Under the doom-laden headline “Antarctic ice shelf set to collapse” the ABC breathlessly attributes the possible loss of the Wilkins Ice Shelf to “climate change caused by heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels.” It reports that 25,000 sq km of ice has been lost “in total” – since when, we are not told.

Wow, 25,000 sq km sounds like a hell of a lot of ice…! But, as always, the reality is different. The total Antarctic sea ice area varies from about 2.5 million sq km to nearly 15 million sq km, meaning the total loss claimed is only 1% of the minimum and about 0.15% of the maximum sea ice extent. Furthermore, in April 2008, the sea ice anomaly compared to the 1979-2000 average was up nearly 2 million sq km! Even now, it is up on the average. So even though ice is being lost here, it is being made up even more over there…

Read it here.

Writing in The Australian, Professor Bob Carter discusses the current cooling trend and wonders why the alarmists are “denying” that fact (he’s clearly picked up on my recent post about alarmists being the new deniers…!)…

Thus using several fundamentally different mathematical techniques and many different data sets, seven scientists all forecast that climatic cooling will occur during the first decades of the 21st century. Temperature records confirm that cooling is under way, the length and intensity of which remains unknown.

Yet in spite of this, governments across the world – egged on by irrational, deep Green lobbying – have for years been using their financial muscle and other powers of persuasion to introduce carbon dioxide taxation systems. For example, the federal Labor government recently spent $13.9million on climate change advertising on prime time television and in national newspapers and magazines.
…
Introduction of a carbon dioxide tax to prevent (imaginary) warming, euphemistically disguised as an emissions trading scheme, is a politician’s, ticket clipper’s and mafia chief’s dream. All will welcome a new source of income based on an invisible, colourless, odourless, tasteless and often unmeasurable gas. No commodity changes hands during its trading, and should carbon dioxide emissions actually decrease because of the existence of a carbon dioxide market (which is highly unlikely), the odds are that it will have no measurable effect on climate anyway. Nonetheless, the glistening pot of gold which beckons to be mined from the innocent public is proving nigh irresistible, and it is going to need a strong taxpayer revolt to stop it in Australia.

Read it here.

We’ll start with a definition today, as this is key to what follows:

Argument from Authority is an informal logical fallacy, formally known as argumentum ad verecundium, where an participant argues that a belief is correct because the person making the argument is an authority. (SkepticWiki)

The Canberra Times has taken over first place in the league table of AGW scaremongers from its stable mates The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald thanks to the work of Rosslyn Beeby and various opinion writers. In an article today, all the old tired clichés are pulled out of the bag one by one, including the “D” word, comparisons with tobacco lobby, funding of sceptics by “Big Oil”, and of course, rubbishing of the Petition Project:

As far as can be judged, some of the 31,000 were not graduates, very few were qualified in scientific disciplines, and almost none had any knowledge of climate change. The petition was organised by a Dr Frederick Seitz, a former president of the US Academy of Science in the 1960s, who worked as a consultant to the tobacco lobby in the 1970s, and who, apparently, has published little research of his own on any subject in 40 years, none of it on the science of climate change. The common strategy in climate change denial is not to offer serious scientific, economic or policy arguments against effective action, but to utilise prejudice, fear and inertia to undermine the case for action.

This is the classic, and fallacious, argument to authority. These 31,000 have “no” qualifications, therefore their opinion is not worth listening to. And it avoids the far more difficult task of addressing their actual arguments (which the writer doesn’t even try). Conversely, however, the fact that 31,000 signatures are on a petition likewise has little “authority” by itself. However, it demonstrates effectively that there is no consensus.

But as the writer appeals to authority, I am entitled to do the same. If he had bothered to take ten seconds do any research on the Petition Project he would have found the following information about the signatories:

• 9,021 PhD; 6,961 MS; 2,240 MD and DVM; and 12,850 BS or equivalent academic degrees;
• Atmospheric, environmental, and Earth sciences includes 3,697 scientists trained in specialties directly related to the physical environment of the Earth and the past and current phenomena that affect that environment;
• Physics and aerospace sciences include 5,691 scientists trained in the fundamental physical and molecular properties of gases, liquids, and solids, which are essential to understanding the physical properties of the atmosphere and Earth; and
• Engineering and general science includes 9,992 scientists trained primarily in the many engineering specialties

Whilst there are many scientists here that are not climate scientists, they are trained in a science discipline to a level that they can see, like me, that the wool is being pulled over their eyes, simply by looking at the evidence available. Proper scientists would never, ever, say, in respect of such a frighteningly complex and (relatively) poorly understood system such as the earth’s climate, that the debate was over or that the science was settled.

Again, as the writer has relied on authority, I am entitled to do the same (again). There were not 2500 scientists involved in the review of the IPCC’s 2007 report. As John McLean points out in his detailed expose of the IPCC review process (link – PDF):

more than 40 of the 53 authors of the crucial chapter of the IPCC 4AR had either worked together, co-authored papers together and in all probability acted as peer reviewers for each others’ work. Instead of being the product of a set of authors with a wide range of views, as the IPCC mandates, the key chapter comes from a narrow coterie of scientists.

The alarmists are the new deniers.

Read it here.

On three occasions since the start of this blog have I had to comment on Governor-General Quentin Bryce overstepping the bounds of her duties as representative of the Queen in Australia by getting involved in political matters, in particular climate issues (see here, here and here).

And now she’s at it again, off on a jolly to Abu Dhabi to speak at the World Future Energy Summit (a fancy title for a gathering of eco-fundamentalists discussing solar and wind power), sharing the stage with Lord Stern, Tony Blair and none other than IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri. So clearly no politics there, then…?

She displays an extraordinary lack of judgement on these matters, and is showing herself to be wholly unsuitable for the role of GG of Australia.

Read it here.

A couple of bizarre headlines from the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, which seems to be reporting any old nonsense these days:

Shiny leafed crops could help reduce global warming, claims study

and

Paint cities white to tackle global warming, scientist says

I present them without comment. Make of them what you will.

Read it here and here.

Or so says the Sydney Morning Herald in its usual style of doom-and-gloom alarmism. Under the headline “Seeing Heard is believing in global warming” (which I had to read about four times before understanding it…) it wails:

The latest bulletin from Heard Island in the Southern Ocean says temperatures are up, rapid retreat of glaciers continues unabated, and a peninsula has been split by the sea to create a new island.

No possibility of all this being caused by anything else, other than global warming? No? Just wondered, because Heard Island is in fact one enormous volcano… as is its neighbour, McDonald Island, which (the article itself concedes) has doubled in size in only a few years.

From the Australian Heard Island website:

Volcanic activity has been observed at Heard Island since the mid 1980s, with fresh lava flows on the southwest flanks of the island.

I wonder what lava flows do to glaciers? Or local temperatures? And I wonder what volcanic activity does to land levels? Move them around a bit maybe?

Personally, I won’t be relying on this particular “global warming barometer”…

Read it here.

Like waiting for a bus, you wait ages for a “scientific organisation selling out to climate change alarmism” story, only for two to come along at once. Following on from my last post, here’s another scientific institution abandoning impartiality and embracing politics, the American Meteorological Society, which has awarded its highest honour to none other than bonkers warming alarmist James Hansen (thanks to Jennifer Marohasy). Hansen, as any fule kno, is in charge of the highly suspect GISS surface temperature record which only a couple of months ago was discovered copying data from one month to the next… Hansen also:

has only contempt for so-called climate change sceptics claiming they operate like tobacco scientists and he has suggested that CEOs of fossil energy companies should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

So pretty well balanced, then. As Jennifer so rightly says:

It seems we live during a period where passion is valued much more than wisdom even by scientific societies.

Read it here.

Vested Interest Alert: The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering has, unsurprisingly, announced that Australia requires a “technology revolution” in order to “tackle climate change” and that the bill for such revolution will be a cool $6 billion.

The report argues that emissions trading, which will put a price on carbon pollution from 2010, is “necessary but not sufficient” to tackle climate change.

Without massive spending on technology, Australia will not meet its promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the report says.

Like the Royal Society in the UK, which has abandoned all trace of its historic heritage as a body for impartial, sceptical investigation of science, and made clear that “the debate is over” on climate change, here we have another science related organisation swallowing the alarmist agenda (and cashing in as well).

As I have said before, science goes out of the window when you follow the money… Both the Royal Society and the ATSE have become political, not scientific, organisations. How many more of the world’s prestigious scientific bodies will sell out for a quick buck in the climate change economy?

Read it here.