Found an interesting website today run by Luboš Motl, a physicist in the Czech Republic. He frequently comments about scientific frauds and crackpots, and AGW is not excepted from evisceration with facts.
…Pachauri “cautioned” the meta-IPCC panel not to “undermine the scientists’ motivation”. In other words, the railway engineer blackmailed the would-be independent panel and asked them not to dare to insult the AGW bigots’ religious sensibilities and funding.
The slides are mostly about the “impressive” U.N. institutions and their complicated relationships. But let me choose slide 6 of 12 from Pachauri’s talk. It shows the number of papers about climate change:
That’s a pretty scary growth, especially if we appreciate the fact that the research hasn’t found anything substantial about the climate in the last 15 years.
Clearly, the increase of the work – and corresponding salaries – entirely depends (or depended) on the recent AGW hysteria. The period 2006-2010 is omitted: it would probably be even worse, even if you assume that 2010 is the first year when this tumor will begin to be operated away from the scientific community.
…Now, try to imagine that 90% of your income rests on an assumption or a belief. Wouldn’t you be tempted to defend the assumption or the belief? You surely wouldn’t but I guess you can imagine many other people who would.
He continues with the facts about worldwide glacier growth and reduction:
Prince Charles is a known admirer of Islam and there are even rumors he might have converted as well. He is a fanatical believer in the Global Warming lie and is calling for sacrifice. In the biggest convergence of Radical Progressivism and Islam since the Gaza Flotilla the Prince of Wales is now saying Islam offers solutions to fighting Climate Change!
Prince Charles yesterday urged the world to follow Islamic ‘spiritual principles’ in order to save the environment.
In a high-profile speech, the heir to the throne argued that man’s destruction of the world was contrary to the scriptures of all religions – but particularly that of the Islamic faith.
Snip..
Charles, who is a practising Christian, spoke in depth about his own study of the Qu’ran which, he said, tells its followers that there is ‘no separation between Man and Nature’ and says we must always live within Nature’s mean and limits
‘From what I know of the Qu’ran, again and again it describes the natural world as the handiwork of a unitary benevolent power,’ he said.
‘It very explicitly describes Nature as possessing an “intelligibility” and that there is no separation between Man and Nature, precisely because there is no separation between the natural world and God.
Well Islam is good with population control. It reduces the numbers of non Muslim humans, so that will reduce carbon emissions! In all seriousness, this is yet another example of the Tranzi Progressives’ love of Islam.
(Hat Tip: Miss Trixie)
Update: This photo from the article is priceless! clearly Prince Charles is not a great motivational speaker. Even the Muslim students are bored!
Really good article here, about the cranium-in-posterior Chicken Little syndrome known as Malthusianism, after the mad professor Thomas Malthus.
Much has beer written about the crisis de jour that seems to show up every generation; this time being global warming climate change. What this author shows goes beyond that observation of the obvious, and shows another pattern:
The projection of statistical trends into disaster scenarios is as old as the modern science of statistics. People once worried that England’s nascent industrial economy would come to a sputtering halt because forests were disappearing at increasing rates, driven by the need for charcoal. The Peak Charcoal scenario yielded in time to Peak Coal worries before morphing into today’s Peak Oil and Peak Gas scenarios. My favorite Malthusian crisis scenario is the horse manure problem. Nineteenth century statisticians calculated how much cargo a horse could carry, and then looked at the daily needs of London’s population for food and other material goods. From there it was a short step to calculate the amount of manure produced by each cart horse, the number of horses required to operate the manure removal carts, and basically to calculate a choke point: the point where cart horse manure would pile up so high in London’s streets that urban life would come to a crashing halt.
Malthusians always have science on their side, and the science is usually pretty good. The processes involved are scientifically verifiable: the population is increasing at a certain rate; a single horse can haul so much freight so many miles in an eight hour day and, demonstrably, produces a certain amount of manure during that time. Do the math: the sums add up. And so, the Malthusians invariably say at this point, “What is wrong with you that you don’t panic? Are you a science denier, a dung skeptic? Can you not see that every day there is more manure on the streets? Do you realize that the dung isn’t just piling up in your neighborhood, but that dung removal totals are increasing all over the city? Are you a pawn of the cart horse industry, objecting to necessary regulations and taxes that are the only way to control the mounting road apple crisis before we all perish in a great stinking heap of horse hockey?”
What he had the audacity to notice was that going back to the days of horses and buggies, and of factories powered by charcoal, there’s a repeated pattern, over and over and over again. The pattern is that something is growing exponentially, and can’t keep growing forever, and thus there’s a crisis. But these crises never seem to happen, because something new that no expert or central planner ever foresaw materialized. In every event, the anticipaced crisis never materialized.
The problem for the central planners and experts is inherent myopia. Nobody can see much beyond the 10-year horizon, and hardly anything beyond the 20-year horizon. And human ingenuity always seems to bail us out right when we think we’re (to use Kirly’s favorite word) doomed.
Putting so much of the world’s environmental energy and talent behind a quixotic solution is a bad idea. That energy, creativity and commitment needs to work more efficiently and strategically if the world is to make enough progress on enough of its environmental issues.
It’s also a bad idea to think that anything other than corruption can possibly result from a multinational governmental action. Even if there is a somewhat urgent problem, the do-nothing option is the least bad option. The intelligentsia just don’t have the clairvoyance (let alone the honesty) to plan anything better. When monkeys rolling dice are right more of the time…
Do you know, China is set to pass the US this year as the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide? I say, let’s get on board that campaign! For every blog displaying a colorful “my blog belches carbon” icon (small sidebar version here, pointlessly large version here), China will build another inefficient coal-fired electricity plant or smoke-belching industrial smokestack. Why, your humble blog could be responsible for spewing thousands of extra tons of carbon dioxide (along with unknown quantities of other, real pollutants) into the atmosphere every year!
H.R. 4997 (ih), currently under review, proposes a requirement that all cinematic movie theaters replace standard xenon arc lamps with energy saving fluorescent bulbs or tubes and to retrofit the projectors with “kinetoscope” discs, rotated via electrical motors powered by photovoltaic cells, to allow frame-by-frame illumination. Films that previously employed the standard 24 frames per second shall be reduced to 8 to 16 frames per second in order to shorten the length of the illumination power requirements.
From cartoonsbyjosh.com, via WUWT, via our PaladinPhil, the real reason why the panicsphere is suddenly talking about ocean farts:
This is an open methane thread.
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As a total aside, I had a thread earlier when I was smelling BS from that professor in Illinois who juryrigged the Toyota pedal. I was right. Furthermore,
Mr. Gilbert testified before Congress about Electronic Throttle Control, offering his view that the Electronic Control Module (ECM) in Toyota’s vehicles does not sufficiently identify all types of sensor and/or circuit malfunctions that could potentially occur. Upon being questioned, Gilbert also admitted that he was paid by Sean Kane, Safety research & Strategies, for his research and demonstration.
And what’s Kane’s oar in the water?
Mr. Kane produced the report that prompted these hearings, and had acknowledged that his services have been paid for by lawyers currently representing the plaintiffs in litigation against Toyota.
You’ve all heard it before. The gold standard in fanaticism is the young earth crowd -- those who literally believe that the universe, earth, and humans were all created in a week, 5770 years ago. These are the dangerous creationist crackpots who have to be kept from the levers of power at all costs. They’re more dangerous than Islamists, Communists, Nazis, Klingons, Romulans, and even insane asylum inmates. They’re more dangerous, because they’re so diabolically brilliant in their ignorance and stupidity. And they write notes in their palms.
The latest spin to be spun off of the Climategate/CRU kerfuffle is an interview in the BBC of Phil Jones here and here, and summarized here, the head of the CRU in England, and one of the central characters (along with Mann in the US) in the drama. There are several walkbacks in the interview that are significant not because they are any kind of factual surprise, but because of who is walking them back. Most striking is the admission (that everyone already knew) that the warming since 1995 is statistically insignificant.
But something else caught my eye, and the eye of a commenter at ClimateAudit. Jones said this:
‘Of course, if the MWP [Medieval Warm Period; approx. 1000 years ago] was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’
Read that very carefully. The MWP was approximately 1000 years ago. Jones said that if the high temperature 1000 years ago is less than the peak now, that the peak now is, in his words, “unprecedented”. He doesn’t seem to think the world is very old does he? I can no longer find on the internet Jim Hansen’s creationist ramblings, but this seems to be falling right in there with that.
There are a lot of subtle issues with that and other statements that he made in the interview, but I think that serves to illustrate the weak reasoning that buttresses the case for climate emergency.
One of the more bizarre knock-on consequences of Jones’ interview is this strange non-sequetur:
The Daily Mail’s story by David Rose, claiming that climate scientist Phil Jones “admitted” there has been no global warming since 1995, is completely false.
This claim is completely false. The link (does this Johnson guy ever do any original investigation?) adds some context that may or may not be evident in the DM article, but saying that earlier warm periods are natural has nothing whatsoever with talking about the prior 15 years. This is a classic non-sequitur. Jones said what he said about the statistical significance of the trend over the past 15 years, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with attribution. Why are people such idiots?
And while I’m on the subject of climate emergency and weak minds, this in from Cambridge, MA, who seem to be trying to take the municipal insanity award away from Berkeley, CA:
“This emergency is created by the growth of local greenhouse gas emissions despite the urgent warnings of climate scientists that substantial reductions are needed in order to reduce the risk of disastrous changes to our climate,” the Climate Congress reported in proposals issued on Jan. 23. “This proposal is made in the belief that an effective local response is, if anything, made more urgent by so far inadequate global agreements and federal policies for emissions reductions. It is made in the belief that our City should lead by example.
So Cambridge is going to single-handedly stop climate change being caused by the rest of the world. More specific proposals here:
Need to change community norms and expectations such that it is all right to tell your neighbors what they can and cannot do in the realm of climate change‐related behavior.”
[...]
Many CEC delegates, however, truly believe that climate armageddon is imminent; one proposal is that Cambridge “develop [a] relationship with an inland sister city to prepare for relocation away from coasts when sea level rises.” (Notes 15.) Two hundred years from now, we read, “all that’s left is spore and viruses. The world uninhabitable for people.” Given this belief that urgent action is needed, once laws and enforcement mechanisms are in place, “encouragement” will give way to “mandates,” as in “[s]chools and hospitals could be mandated to serve only local foods.” (Notes 78.)
Yeah. These guys have been smoking a little too much soylent green.
I wonder if the washed-up ukelele player/ponytailed douchebag and his dimwitted minions will take the time to read and consider these excellent articles about the AGW HOAX from the London Daily Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal while they’re here stalking us.
But then again, considering the lack of intellect of the imbeciles that post over there, I’d have better luck getting those clueless morons to read something if I provided a link to www.drseuss.com. So, enjoy, all you stalkers from Nancy’s cesspool…And get a life, will you please? Maybe you can ask Santa Charles for one.
“Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.”
If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L. Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:
“In an odd way this is cheering news.”
But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters.
Manipulation of evidence:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.
“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”
[...]
But to judge by the way – despite the best efforts of the MSM not to report on it – the CRU scandal is spreading like wildfire across the internet, this shabby story represents a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility from which it is never likely to recover.
