Not "New Scientist", but "Non Scientist"

16 December, 2009 by

Joke publication

Joke publication

Jo Nova takes the global warming alarmist science mag to pieces:

It’s beyond silly. The mindless, irrelevant attacks go on. They attack Nigel Lawson for using a misleadingly short time (eight years) to argue that the world is not warming (which is exactly what the satellite data shows). Eight years is too short for New Scientist to announce a flat trend, but in every other article with a single flood, a single cyclone, or a single heat wave, one week is long enough for New Scientist to imply that global warming might be to blame. So a season of hurricanes is significant, but years of cooling is misleading. Righto. (And Amen).

They attack Christopher Monckton’s paper, not because they can summarize why it was in error, but because another group disagree, and there are some technicalities of whether it jumped through the right hoops to be called “peer review.” Attack the man and not the message eh? New Scientist stands up for the bureaucratic details of “peer review” (only some peers count), but they won’t stand up for the independent scientists, the whistleblowers who want access to data, just to check those “peer reviewed papers” didn’t turn out to be baseless frauds like the Hockey Stick.

We subscribers buy New Scientist in the hope it will impartially give us both sides of the story, in a summary form which is accurate… and the subscribers are rebelling. The comments below the article are 90% skeptics, 2% believers, and the rest are presumably so angry their’s were deleted.

Brilliant. Read it here.

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UPDATED: When the going gets desperate…

15 December, 2009 by

Clearly stressed by so much climate spin…

Clearly stressed by so much climate spin…

… the desperate get going. In this case, Al Gore, who is wheeled out like some old relic to peddle more meaningless alarmism based on hopeless computer models to the gullible twits at Copenhagen:

Gore cited new scientific work at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, whose Arctic ice research is important for planning polar voyages by Navy submarines. The computer modeling there stresses the “volumetric,” looking not just at the surface extent of ice but its thickness as well.

“Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore said. His office later said he meant nearly ice-free, because ice would be expected to survive in island channels and other locations. [“Some” of the models? So I guess “others” didn’t – guess which ones Al chooses – Ed]

Asked for comment, one U.S. government scientist questioned what he called this “aggressive” projection.

“It’s possible but not likely,” said Mark Serreze of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. “We’re sticking with 2030.”

Even the US government is embarrassed by Gore’s wild predictions. And anyway, what’s the big deal about Arctic ice anyway? If the planet is warming, there’ll be less ice – it doesn’t prove human causation. Gore sounds like Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun: “There’s a 50:50 chance of no ice in 5 years, but there’s only a 10% chance of that.”

Read it here.

Update: The Times picks up Gore’s error, and as Marc Morano says, Gore is no longer getting a “free ride” from the media:

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.

[…]

Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

[…]

Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.”

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UK Met Office Madness: 10 years to "save the world"

10 December, 2009 by

Hysterical

Hysterical

When I was growing up in the UK, the Met Office was the centre of cool-headed, scientific thinking. As a kid I used to listen to the Shipping Forecast and plot synoptic charts from the observations. So much has changed. The Met Office is now the centre for hysterical climate alarmism, devoid of any scientific impartiality, it is now just a political mouthpiece, as evidenced by its latest rant:

The world has just ten years to bring greenhouse gas emissions under control before the damage they cause become irreversible, the Met Office has warned.

Should nations fail to tackle the issue, giant mirrors in space, artificial trees and other so called “geo-engineering solutions” will be the only way to prevent disastrous overheating of the planet, the researchers warned.

More than 190 countries are gathered in Copenhagen for UN climate change talks aimed at keeping global temperature rise below 3.6F (2C).

Pollution [pollution? – Ed] from cars and factories will have to be declining at a rate of five per cent a year by 2020, the Met Office said.

World emissions are currently growing at around three per cent per annum and it will take massive investment in renewable energy, electric cars, nuclear and other green technologies to stop the growth.

It is estimated it would cost the world around 2.5 per cent of GDP or £150 for every person on the planet to make such massive cuts.

Jason Lowe, head of mitigation advice at the Met Office, said that if the world does not manage to turn the situation around in time then temperatures will rise by more than 2C “unless you can pull carbon dioxide out of the air or reflect sunlight back into space”.

Mr Lowe knows when he’s on to a good thing. If mitigation weren’t required, he’d be out of a job.

Read it here.

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Idiotic Comment of the Day: David Jones, BoM

10 December, 2009 by

ICOTD: Worthy winner

ICOTD: Worthy winner

Here’s the head of climate analysis at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, showing astonishing ignorance about what is happening in the climate:

“The decade 2000-2009 is very likely to be the warmest on record,” said World Meteorological Organisation secretary-general Michel Jarraud.

Head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology Dr David Jones said the data should silence climate sceptics.

“Clearly climate change hasn’t stopped, global warming hasn’t stopped,” he said. “The planet is continuing to warm – and it’s warming in our back yard.”

Shall we take it apart?

  1. First off, the climate is warming gently from the depth of the Little Ice Age, and therefore it is no surprise that temperatures this decade are warmer than last. This proves nothing about the influence of human emissions of CO2.
  2. The present warming is not unusual in magnitude or rate.
  3. “On record” means since 1850, ignoring the Holocene Climate Optiumum and the Medieval and Roman warm periods, all of which were warmer than present.
  4. Sceptics do not believe that climate change isn’t happening, but they question the extent of human influence. To claim that rising temperatures on their own will “silence sceptics” is laughable.
  5. Check the satellite records:

November 2009 temperature plot from UAH

November 2009 temperature plot from UAH

There has been no statistically significant warming since about 2001. It’s true that the fudged surface station data shows warming, most of which is man made (i.e. man made “adjustments”), but the satellite data isn’t open to such manipulation, and shows no warming.

Verdict: 0/10. Must try harder.

Read it here.

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Sick: Clive Hamilton rants on ABC Unleashed

9 December, 2009 by

Seriously deranged

Seriously deranged

As Andrew Bolt puts it, there is something seriously sick about this guy. I suppose we should be pleased in a way. When people run out of cogent arguments, they resort to this sort of hysterical emotional blackmail. Hamilton has obviously run out of arguments:

Hi there,

There’s something you need to know about your father.

Your dad’s job is to try to stop the government making laws to reduce Australia’s carbon pollution. He is paid a lot of money to do that by big companies who do not want to own up to the fact that their pollution is changing the world’s climate in very harmful ways.

Because of their pollution, lots of people, mostly poor people, are likely to die. They will die from floods, from diseases like dengue fever, and from starvation when their crops won’t grow anymore.

The big companies are putting their profits before the lives of people. And your dad is helping them.

Your life is going to be worse too because of what your dad is doing when he goes to work each morning. By the time you are as old as your parents, Australia will be having a lot more heat waves, … blah blah blah. There’s loads more, but really, I will not sully the pages of this blog with such unadulterated bulls#!t.

If you do decide to read it (here), just check out the comments:

“disgraceful”, “appalling” “pathetic fear mongering”, “offensive piece of sludge”, “idiocy”, “deranged”, “condescending, prejudiced pap”, “Shameful. And shameless”, “anti-intellectual”, “self-indulgent rubbish.”

Just about sums it up. Nice work, Clive. Now go away, we never want to hear this sort of rantings again, thanks.

PS. You guys in Hamilton dodged a bullet – can you imagine this twit as your MP? Doesn’t bear thinking about.

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Copenhagen – Day 2: "disarray"

9 December, 2009 by

Day 2

Day 2

It hasn’t taken long for the wheels to start coming loose on the Copenhagen bandwagon, if reports at News.com.au are to be believed. Under the headline “Copenhagen conference in disarray“, it reports that certain documents have been leaked showing wealthier nations would be given more power in future climate change negotiations:

The documents seem to allow a handful of rich countries to have larger emissions and more control over future talks within a “circle of commitment” and have enraged delegates from developing countries.

The US, UK, and Denmark are among the countries included in the so-called “Danish text.”

The document also sets unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.

The secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as “the circle of commitment” – understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week, The Guardian reports.

…

The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as “a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks”, the paper reports. (source)

The ABC (incredibly) has more:

The document abandons the Kyoto Protocol, sidelines the United Nations in future climate change negotiations, and hands most of the power to rich countries.

The Kyoto Protocol relied on the principle that rich nations – responsible for the bulk of emissions – can and should be compelled to take on the biggest burden when it comes to cutting those emissions.

Under Kyoto, poorer nations were not required to act at all.

The leaked agreement not only brings the developing world into the frame, it allows rich countries to emit twice as much carbon as poor countries. (source)

Ouch. That should really stir things up! See BBC coverage here.

The other big news this morning is that this decade is shaping up to be “the hottest on record”. (They use “hotter” and “hottest” as a cheap trick to make it sound more dramatic – we’re talking tenths of one degree here.) Since the planet is emerging from the Little Ice Age, it’s a bit like saying “spring will be warmer hotter than winter”, and since “on record” means in the last 150 years, it ignores all previous warmings, such as the Medieval Warm Period, which were warmer, sorry, hotter.  In other words, Big Freaking Deal. And even then, none of this proves that the warming is anthropogenic, nor that cutting emissions will make the slightest difference.

But that doesn’t stop the moonbat media latching on to it to claim that it’s even more important that we strike a deal at Copenhagen:

“World’s hottest decade adds to pressure for climate accord”

The UN’s top weather expert warned Tuesday that the world is in its hottest decade on record as climate negotiators plunged into talks seeking a historic deal on cutting carbon emissions.

The prediction by the World Meteorological Organisation underlined the pressure for an agreement at a summit in Copenhagen, which was boosted when the United States said it would start to regulate carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant.

“The decade 2000-2009 is very likely to be the warmest on record, warmer than the 1990s, which were in turn warmer than the 1980s,” World Meteorological Organisation Secretary General Michel Jarraud told a press conference.

Jarraud also said that the year 2009 would probably rank as the fifth warmest since accurate records were started in 1850. (source)

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Nauseating start to Copenhagen

7 December, 2009 by

Loving every second of it

Loving every second of it

Wouldn’t have expected anything less, naturally! All lovingly reported by the Sydney Moonbat Herald:

A landmark conference on tackling climate change opened here on Monday, with negotiators from 192 countries aiming toward a deal to ward off global warming’s potentially catastrophic effects.

The meeting will climax on December 18 with more than 100 heads of state or government in attendance.

Opening ceremonies began with a short film featuring children of the future facing an apocalypse of tempests and desert landscapes if world leaders failed to act today.

“There will be hundreds of millions of refugees,” Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN’s panel of climate scientists, said in the film.

“Please help save the world,” said a little girl, plaintively. (source)

So no emotional blackmail there, obviously…

It’s only been going three hours, and already I want it to stop.

Don’t forget to check out the Cut out ‘n’ keep guide to Copenhagen in the sidebar!

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Full speed for an alarmism week

7 December, 2009 by

Nice Bristols

Nice Bristols*

The other thing that we should expect in the next 11 days is full on climate hysteria, with apocalyptic predictions, everything “happening faster, bigger, badder than we thought”. But now we can take it all with a pinch of salt, since in this post-CRU world, we give our climate scientists even less leeway than they had before. The latest scare is that the climate is “more sensitive than previously thought” to CO2, so we need even deeper, harsher, bigger and badder cuts.

From our “The Science is Settled” department:

In the long term, the Earth’s temperature may be 30-50 per cent more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated, reports a new study published in Nature Geoscience this week.

The results show that components of the Earth’s climate system that vary over long timescales – such as land-ice and vegetation – have an important effect on this temperature sensitivity, but these factors are often neglected in current climate models.

Dr Dan Lunt, from the University of Bristol, and colleagues compared results from a global climate model to temperature reconstructions of the Earth’s environment three million years ago when global temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations were relatively high. The temperature reconstructions were derived using data from three-million-year-old sediments on the ocean floor.

Lunt said, “We found that, given the concentrations of carbon dioxide prevailing three million years ago, the model originally predicted a significantly smaller temperature increase than that indicated by the reconstructions. This led us to review what was missing from the model.”

But, but, but… our models are perfect, aren’t they? They must be – the planet is about to spend trillions of dollars based on their output. But not to worry. Results of climate research never say “it’s not as bad as we thought” or “we may have overestimated this.” What are the chances of every piece of research always saying it’s worse? And of course, the inevitable call to action:

Alan Haywood, a co-author on the study from the University of Leeds, said “If we want to avoid dangerous climate change, this high sensitivity of the Earth to carbon dioxide should be taken into account when defining targets for the long-term stabilisation of atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations”.

This is all about feedbacks of course. The actual warming effect of a doubling of CO2 is virtually nothing, but the models rely on fudge factors in the feedbacks in order to make the models fit what has already happened in the past. However, because this leads to huge positive feedbacks, temperature projections go through the roof for a modest increase in CO2. The fact is that no climate scientist understands the feedbacks, because there are still thousands of unknowns or unquantifiables (despite Kevin Rudd and Gordon Brown telling us all “the science is settled”), which means the models don’t either, and the results are close to worthless.

Read it here.

*Cockney rhyming slang: Bristol Cities – t*tties.

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UK PM Gordon Brown: "We know the science."

6 December, 2009 by

Dumb and dumber

Dumb and dumber

Gordon Brown isn’t the sharpest tool in the bag, but he’s resorting to ever more desperate hyperbole in the lead up to Copenhagen. And he clearly hasn’t read the CRU exchanges either:

BRITISH Prime Minister Gordon Brown has led a chorus of condemnation against ”flat-earth” climate change sceptics who have tried to derail the Copenhagen summit by casting doubt on the evidence for global warming.

Sceptics in the UK and US have moved to capitalise on a series of hacked emails from climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia, England, claiming they show attempts to hide information that does not support the case for human activity causing rising temperatures.

On the eve of the Copenhagen summit, Saudi Arabia and Republican members of the US Congress have used the emails to claim the need for urgent action to cut carbon emissions has been undermined.

But on Friday Mr Brown, UK Environment Secretary Ed Miliband, and Ed Markey, co-author of the US climate change bill, joined forces to condemn the sceptics.

”With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics,’‘ Mr Brown said. ”We know the science. We know what we must do. We must now act and close the 5 billion-tonne gap. That will seal the deal.”

According to the British Government adviser Sir Nicholas Stern, 10 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions must be taken out of the atmosphere by 2020. So far agreement is in place for only half that amount.

Mr Miliband gave his most damning assessment of the sceptics yet, describing them as ”dangerous and deceitful”. He said: ”The approach of the climate saboteurs is to misuse data and mislead people. The sceptics are playing politics with science in a dangerous and deceitful manner. The evidence is clear and the time we have to act is short. To abandon this process now would lead to misery and catastrophe for millions.”

All of this would be hilarious, if it weren’t so serious. Here we have the prime minister of the UK, who hasn’t a clue about the scientific method, calling those who correctly question scientific data “flat earthers” – and Ed Miliband calling them “deceitful”. It’s nothing short of astonishing, and rather ironic given the deceit clearly going on in the AGW science community.

The reality is that Brown and Miliband are gullible fools, who believe anything and everything the IPCC, and all its scientists, tell them.

Read it here.

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Global warming "could enrage sharks"

4 December, 2009 by

"Grr, who turned up the heater?"

Enraged goldfish: "Grr, who turned up the heater?"

Stick with it. This journalist clearly hasn’t heard of Climategate and still believes every press release about global warming that lands on his desk.

Warmer ocean temperatures caused by global warming could [important word, that – Ed] cause sharks and other fish to become more aggressive, according to a new Australian study.

Research conducted by the University of New South Wales [Note to self: remember not to send kids to UNSW – Ed] found that a slight lift in water temperatures — just two or three degrees — can cause some fish to become up to 30 times more aggressive than they normally would be.

The studies were conducted on young damsel fish, but head researcher Dr Peter Biro told ninemsn it is possible that sharks could also undergo a similar transformation in warm water.

[And this is what happened next. The poor journo thought the story was just too boring with only damsel fish (whatever they are), so, desperate for an alarmist headline, asked the “scientist” if it would affect sharks, because sharks = scary. And the response below was just what was needed – phew. Scary headline in the bag – Ed]

“I would imagine that it might also affect sharks … we think it is linked to the metabolism of the fishes — it increases their need to feed,” Dr Biro said.

The research involved putting the damsel fish in varying temperatures of water and placing other fish behind glass to see how they reacted.

Dr Biro said it was “obvious” the warmer water had an effect.

“Some fish would literally charge at the glass,” he said.

“I’m quite confident that if the glass was not there they would have torn the other fish to shreds.”

So next time you see a flounder getting mugged by a marauding gang of barramundi, you’ll know why.

Read it here.

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