UK: Chief Scientist exits in a blaze of hysteria

26 March, 2013 by

Head scratch moment?

Head scratch moment?

Sir John Beddington is the outgoing Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government, and, like our own Sir Ian Chubb, appears to take leave of his senses when it comes to climate.

In a final whirlwind of alarmism, Beddington exits stage left, hopefully never to be seen or heard of again. As the Telegraph breathlessly reports:

The world faces decades of turbulent weather even if it takes drastic action to tackle climate change, the Government’s chief scientific adviser said today in a final stark warning as he prepares to step down.

Professor Sir John Beddington said that time lags in the climate system meant that accumulations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now will determine the weather we experience for the next 25 years.

Climate change is already manifesting itself in huge variations in the weather, clearly illustrated by the way Britain experienced both drought and extreme rainfall last year, he said.

The scientist said that the international community’s failure to agree binding targets for cutting carbon emissions meant problems were being stored up for the future.

“They may reach agreement, and they may start to reduce greenhouse gases in the next five years, or it may be a little longer,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“But they are still climbing, and when that increase is reversed, we will be left with the weather and the climate for the next 25 years from whenever that happens.”

What’s missing from this picture? Any acknowledgement that there has been a pause in warming which was not expected or predicted by the climate models, despite the headbangers claiming that warming is accelerating.*

Sir Ian Chubb falls into the same trap as Beddington – toeing a politically-correct line rather than responding to the evidence in an impartial, free-thinking manner.

More reaction here:

*They do this by suddenly ignoring global temperatures and, like street magicians, using diversionary techniques to shift focus on to something else

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Live blogroll returns… (kind of)

25 March, 2013 by

Blog Roll Returns!

Blog Roll Returns!

I have restored 90% of the functionality of the Live Blog Roll by adding RSS feeds for a dozen or so of the most popular blogs the sidebar on the right. If you hover over the post title, you will get the first few lines of the post. They are in no particular order, apart from the granddaddy of them all, WUWT, being at the top. Unfortunately they won’t be sorted by recency of post as they were on the old blog, but I hope it’s better than nothing.

If anyone can suggest a better option using the WordPress.com platform, please let me know!

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Bloggies: ACM wins best Australian & New Zealand Blog!

25 March, 2013 by

bloggies_2013

ACM – Best Aussie or NZ Blog!

UPDATE: Watts Up wins best Sci/Tech and Weblog of the Year, Small Dead Animals wins best Canadian Blog, and James Delingpole wins Best Political Blog. Also, Michael Smith won Best-Kept Secret Blog for Michael Smith News. Congratulations all! Commiserations to Jo Nova in Sci/Tech, but with Watts Up out of the picture having now won it three times, maybe next year!

Thank you to my many supporters who voted for ACM in the Bloggies. Having been runner up to Jo Nova last year, her elevation to the Best Science Blog category saw me in with a chance.

It is funny to watch the climate alarmists squirm as sceptical blogs take out many categories. Why don’t they just mobilise their supporters to vote for them, rather than complaining about how the competition is run? Or flouncing off…

Anyway, thanks again!

Simon, ACM

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ACM cancels out Earth Hour

24 March, 2013 by

ACM Towers' display for Power Hour

ACM Towers’ display for Power Hour

Once again, congratulations to all of you who turned off your electric lights last night and sat around in the dark for an hour with a few candles burning. When I say ‘congratulations’ I actually mean ‘tough luck, suckers’ because you have actually increased the carbon dioxide emissions of the planet by doing so. Well done.

Bjørn Lomborg explains:

Hypothetically, switching off the lights for an hour would cut CO2 emissions from power plants across the world. But even if everyone in the world cut all residential lighting, and this translated entirely into CO2 reduction, it would be the equivalent of China pausing its CO2 emissions for less than four minutes. In fact, Earth Hour will cause emissions to increase.

As Britain’s National Grid operators have found, a small decline in electricity consumption does not translate into less energy being pumped into the grid, and therefore will not reduce emissions. Moreover, during Earth Hour any significant drop in electricity demand will entail a reduction in CO2 emissions during the hour, but it will be offset by the surge from firing up coal or gas stations to restore electricity supplies afterwards.

And the cosy candles that many participants will light, which seem so natural and environmentally friendly, are still fossil fuels and almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light bulbs. Using one candle for each switched-off bulb cancels out even the theoretical CO2 reduction; using two candles means that you emit more CO2. (source)

And in any event, ACM ensured that the efforts of New South Wales environmentalists (with the emphasis on ‘mentalists’) were negated by the annual Power Hour display at ACM Towers (photo).

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Cook & Lew label senior Met Office climatologist a ‘conspiracy theorist’

21 March, 2013 by

Cook and Lew - twisted reality

Cook and Lew – twisted reality

UPDATE: Cook and Lew tie themselves in syntactical and grammatical knots  over at Un-Sk Ps-S trying to explain that they weren’t really calling Betts a conspiracy theorist…

In John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky’s twisted version of reality, anyone who disagrees with them is a conspiracy theorist.

So obsessed have they become with this piece of cheap psychobabble that they have written two papers about it, the second claiming that there was conspiracy theorising from sceptics in the responses to the first paper, which also accused sceptics of conspiracy theorising about climate change. Following me so far? [No – Ed]

In the Supplementary Information for the second paper (a PDF here – make sure you know where the zoom button is), Cook and Lew quote from a guy called Richard Betts, who left a comment at Bishop Hill, as follows:

The thing I don’t understand is, why didn’t they just make a post on sceptic blogs themselves, rather than approaching blog owners. They could have posted as a Discussion topic here at Bishop Hill without even asking the host, and I very much doubt that the Bish would have removed it. Climate Audit also has very light-touch moderation and I doubt whether Steve McIntyre would have removed such an unsolicited post. Same probably goes for many of the sceptic blogs, in my experience. So it does appear to that they didn’t try very hard to solicit views from the climate sceptic community. 

This is labelled  by the learned Professor and his Eureka-Prize-winning sidekick as an “excerpt espousing conspiracy theory” under the category of “Didn’t email deniers”.

So who is Richard Betts? I’ll give you a clue. He leads the “Climate Impacts area, specialising in ecosystem-hydrology-climate interactions but also overseeing work on urban, health, industry and finance” at the UK Met Office…!

Current activities

Richard is Head of the Climate Impacts strategic area, which includes climate impacts research and also the climate change consultancy unit.

The Met Office’s main role in climate impacts research is to facilitate a more integrated approach to the assessment of climate change impacts, in collaboration with specialists across the wider academic community. A large part of our impacts research, therefore, involves examining the interactions between different impacts areas, such as agriculture, natural ecosystems, water resources, glaciers, urban areas and human health.

Richard leads the impacts theme of the JULES community land surface modelling programme. This collaborative project forms part of UK-wide efforts to assess impacts in an internally-consistent manner. (full bio here)

He is also a Lead Author for IPCC AR4 WG1 and a Contributing Author for IPCC AR4 WG2… and Cook and Lew think he’s a climate conspiracy theorist. Bahahahahaha! Epic fail!

UPDATE: Thanks to Barry Woods for Richard’s Twitter response:

Lewandowsky et al clearly deluded!

More laughs to be had at the following sites:

Background to the Lew Papers is here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Another farcical day in the Gillard government…

21 March, 2013 by

Terminal

Terminal (photo from here)

Rather than trouble themselves with the petty concerns of the lumpen proletariat, the Canberra elite carried off another spectacular day of navel gazing, as Julia Gillard once again called for a leadership ballot after a senior minister, Simon Crean, poked the hornets’ nest earlier today.

Even lefty Lenore of the Silly Moaning Herald can’t say much in Labor’s defence:

One thing the Labor Party is supposed to be good at organising is a political assassination. Even their opponents assumed that.

Before the Labor caucus even met on Thursday afternoon the Liberal Party had released an ad featuring the man who triggered the showdown – Simon Crean – bagging out Kevin Rudd, obviously preparing for the return of the former leader. The tag line… ”Labor, it’s a farce”.

After this debacle, with an election just six months away, the Rudd ”camp” must surely be folding their tents. 

But the Liberals didn’t know the half of it. When the caucus met, the plotters found they didn’t even have a candidate. This wasn’t farce, it was a comedy horror show like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

Labor’s political dysfunction had reached levels unprecedented even for a party that has spent much of the last three years tearing itself asunder.

Its dysfunction was so profound it had to scramble on the floor of the House of Representatives to win crossbench support and avoid a no confidence motion – which would have precipitated an early election – all because of a leadership challenge that never happened.

It had to stare down the no confidence motion against the Prime Minister in the Parliament when everyone knew it was considering an internal no confidence motion against her in the caucus room just hours later.

The former leader Crean had to call for the leadership ballot before Rudd had agreed to be a candidate in order to try to sway some undecided votes because the party had been bogged in leadership dysfunction ever since the last showdown over a year ago.

Reversing the normal situation where the incumbent has to be blasted out of the job, in the modern ALP people apparently have to try to blast a challenger in.

This rabble would make a busload of pissed clowns look by comparison like the House of Lords.

An election cannot come soon enough. Time for the cross-benchers to pull the plug – finally.

Filed Under: Aussie Politics Tagged With: ,

Environmentalists regarded as ‘borderline communists’

21 March, 2013 by

Watermelons

Watermelons

And the Pope is Catholic. Now tell us something we didn’t know.

It’s unfortunately true that most environmentalists hail from the Left of the political spectrum – that’s simply a fact. Why else are climate protests peppered with banners from the Socialist Workers’ Party and other extreme left organisations, that the Greens are a party of the left and there is a publication entitled Green Left Weekly?

Environmentalism and socialism go together like… windmills and solar panels.

It is a widely held belief, based on plenty of supporting evidence, that environmentalists are using a green agenda as a Trojan Horse to achieve the political goals of more regulation, higher taxes, wealth distribution and global government.

As News.com.au reports:

MANY climate sceptics do not trust environmentalists because they consider them “borderline communists” who want to curtail people’s freedom, a leading US social scientist says.

Speaking on Wednesday night, the University of Michigan’s Andy Hoffman said US global warming sceptics had “a serious distrust of the political ideology behind its proponents”.

“The fear is that environmentalists are left-leaning, they are socialist, borderline communists, and they are using the government to try to control your freedom,” Prof Hoffman said in the Sydney Ideas lecture at the University of Sydney.

“The expression for environmentalists is watermelons, they’re green on the outside, but they’re red on the inside. That really represents their feeling.”

Mr Hoffman said a scientific consensus that humans contribute to climate change had failed to lead to action on the issue because it was really a “debate over values”.

He said despite compelling science, just 40 per cent of Australians believed humans contributed to a hotter planet.

Who can disagree so far? But then it goes downhill, with Hoffman then claiming that it is because of the sceptics “values” that they are sceptical:

“It’s not about CO2, it’s not about climate models, it’s about values, it’s about world views,” the business and environment academic said.

“It’s because deeply held beliefs that they hold dear are under threat.”

Climate change was such a “thorny issue” because it represented “an existential challenge to our world views”, he said.

In that context, he said giving climate deniers [red card for that – Ed] more scientific evidence was like “finding yourself talking to a wall, they’re not going to hear it”.

Professor Hoffman said a “social consensus” to fight climate change needed to be built, similar to that created in the past to combat smoking and slavery.

Hoffman has flipped the argument 180 degrees. Sceptics doubt the pronouncements of environmentalists and climate change activists because of their political leanings AND because they fudge data, massage results, “offer up scary scenarios” as Stephen Schneider once said, delete emails (ClimateGate) and avoid FOI requests.

If the science were genuinely impartial and beyond reproach, then “sceptics” wouldn’t need to search for ulterior motives to explain the environmentalists’ desire to railroad through their agenda.

As it is, however, they are their own worst enemy.

“One of the most important first steps in engaging the debate is not to blame or mock or ridicule,” he said.

You could start by acknowledging the true reasons for climate scepticism.

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UK: Climate indoctrination removed from schools

20 March, 2013 by

"Recite after me: In the beginning, Labor created the Climate Commission..."

“Recite after me: In the beginning, Labor created the Climate Commission and the carbon tax…”

Cue the headbangers going ape in 3, 2, 1… Because it had become impossible to have any kind of sensible teaching of climate change in schools, the UK government is proposing to cut climate change from the syllabus for children up to the age of 14. Huzzah and hooray.

And the headbangers are indeed steamed up, complaining that such a cut is “political interference”, oblivious to the fact that it was their relentless propaganda campaign to indoctrinate climate dogma in the classroom that forced this action in the first place.

The Guardian, naturally, gets hot under the collar:

Debate about climate change has been cut out of the national curriculum for children under 14, prompting claims of political interference in the syllabus by the government that has failed “our duty to future generations”.

The latest draft guidelines for children in key stages 1 to 3 have no mention of climate change under geography teaching and a single reference to how carbon dioxide produced by humans impacts on the climate in the chemistry section. There is also no reference to sustainable development, only to the “efficacy of recycling”, again as a chemistry subject.

The move has caused alarm among climate campaigners and scientists [!] who say teaching about climate change in schools has helped mobilise young people to be the most vociferous advocates of action by governments, business and society to tackle the issue. [!!!]

“What you seem to have is a major political interference with the geography syllabus,” said the government’s former science adviser Prof Sir David King. He said climate change should be taught alongside the history of – successful – past attempts to curb chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), which is blamed for the depletion of the ozone layer, and air pollution caused by coal fires and cars.

The comparison with CFCs is facile, because while there are alternatives to CFCs, there are no genuinely affordable alternatives to burning fossil fuels, especially for the poor and developing countries of the world.

Note that it is the “climate campaigners” who are complaining the most, because they won’t be able to fill impressionable young minds with their environmental propaganda, and they won’t then go home and badger their parents into installing solar panels or recycling tea bags or switching their lights out for Earth Hour (fast approaching once again – stay tuned). See here for more.

In a way, this is a classic own goal, since students should understand the interaction between humanity and the environment, but since such interaction is inevitably portrayed as a one way street (ie. wailing that we’re destroying the planet), the only option was to remove it entirely.

There’s something called balance, and it’s sadly lacking from the climate debate.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Tinkering with the theme…

19 March, 2013 by

A fair few comments about the new theme being too small, which I agree with. So let me have your feedback on this alternative, which I think is far clearer.

Thanks for your patience while we get this right!

Simon

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Bigger, badder hurricanes say climate scare-mongers

19 March, 2013 by

Wrong again

Wrong again

A good old fashioned scare story from the Silly Moaning Herald, just like the good old days. Remember the cover of Al Gore’s book (see right), showing multiple hurricanes approaching the US (one even spinning the wrong way for the Northern Hemisphere…!)? Well it’s time for that scare to be recycled once again:

The number of Atlantic storms with magnitude similar to killer Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, could rise sharply this century, environmental researchers reported on Monday.

Scientists have long studied the relationship between warmer sea surface temperatures and cyclonic, slowly spinning storms in the Atlantic Ocean, but the new study attempts to project how many of the most damaging hurricanes could result from warming air temperatures as well.

The extreme storms are highly sensitive to temperature changes, and the number of Katrina-magnitude events could double due to the increase in global temperatures that occurred in the 20th century, the researchers reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If temperatures continue to warm in the 21st century, as many climate scientists project, the number of Katrina-strength hurricanes could at least double, and possibly rise much more, with every 1.8 degree F (1 degree C) rise in global temperatures, the researchers said. (source)

Funny that the accumulated cyclone energy is now almost as low as in the mid 1970s, when a new Ice Age was the environmental scare du jour. Apparently, 30+ years of man made warming hasn’t made much of an impact on cyclone and hurricane activity. But don’t let the facts get in the way of a good scare, eh?

Catastrophic increase in cyclone energy?

Catastrophic increase in cyclone energy?

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,
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