Climate change

[hrothgar]

 

As Morgan Freeman might have said, "And your plan is to get the world to believe that climate scientists are evil and the Energy Industialists are white knights out to save us? Good luck with that."

 

 

Don't forget the tobacco lobbyists.

 

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute_and_tobacco

 

It's worth pointing out that the right wing noise machine has a well documented habit of attacking its enemies in areas where the right is most vulnerable trying to create false equivalence; hence the constant attempt portray academics as trying to benefit financially from the great warming conspiracy.

[blackshoe]

Some niggling little memory in the back of my mind suggests that the left has the same habit.

[hrothgar]

Some niggling little memory in the back of my mind suggests that the left has the same habit.

 

Actually, this is considered to be one of Karl Rove's real innovations in the whole campaign game...

[cloa513]

The problem I have with the skeptics reminds me of the scene from Dark Knight were Morgan Freeman has just been told by an accountant who is auditing Wayne Industry's books that he knows that money is being diverted and that he wants $10 million a year for life for not revealing who Batman really is, and Morgan Freeman responds by saying along the lines of "you are accusing one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful men of being a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands and your plan is to blackmail this person? Good luck with that."

 

The skeptic seems willing to accuse the entirety of climate scientists worldwide and the associated sciences with conspiring to falsify the data in order to increase the net worth of Al Gore, and the data they produce as evidence of their claims is provided to them via the energy industry who earns billions of dollars annually by selling products that increase greenhouse gasses.

 

As Morgan Freeman might have said, "And your plan is to get the world to believe that climate scientists are evil and the Energy Industialists are white knights out to save us? Good luck with that."

[/quote/]

Not the entirety of climate sientists -there is at five hundred that aren't global warming/ climate change fanatics. Most of the falsified/ corrupted data really comes down to only a few organisations and individuals which comes back to very few people- with great attempts at secrecy to protect the poor data. AGW scientists are mostly either lazy and/or green fanatic (who believe changing the world is important no matter how unethically they do that) or modelling fanatics (who don't care if their models don't match empirical measurements) or main streamers ( who are just desparate to avoid being on the wrong side of the powerful corrupters and to keep the special funds coming which are better and easier to get than the normal scientific funding). Some very rich people including carbon credit traders and treaty beaucrats are making big bucks from climate change industry.

 

Not true about getting the data from energy companies, its mostly ordinary individuals with very little money behind them who do the hard yards to get the evidence. Some get a few million dollars from the energy industry which is nothing compared to the billions spent by green fanatics who are corporate funded, massive government funds directed at scientists and organisations to support the climate catalysm hypothesis, which are mostly directed by politically driven bucreacrats- more funds to climate departments. The energy industry mostly prefers to directly lobby politicians.

[Winstonm]

Some very rich people including carbon credit traders and treaty beaucrats are making big bucks from climate change industry.

 

Not true about getting the data from energy companies, its mostly ordinary individuals with very little money behind them who do the hard yards to get the evidence. Some get a few million dollars from the energy industry which is nothing compared to the billions spent by green fanatics

 

As Morgan Freeman might have said, "And your plan is to get the world to believe that climate scientists are evil and the Energy Industialists are white knights out to save us? Good luck with that."

[Al_U_Card]

Either way, J. Gillard, PM of Australia has enacted a carbon tax (due to start in a year) despite the fact that she promised not to do so during her campaign... (oh no! a politician that reversed course? unheard of!) :lol:

 

Since they are to guarantee a price of $13/tonne, FOR 3 YEARS, it should be interesting to see how that works in the "free" markets. Who knows, maybe the CCX (Chicago Carbon Exchange) will rise from its (final value for carbon of $0.05/tonne) ashes and provide another avenue for speculation and fraud....errr investment... just like the European Carbon Exchange. :P

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NDfwkr8hig&feature=player_embedded

 

 

 

But it is for a good cause, saving the earth from us by transferring our money to those that know better.

[PassedOut]

"And your plan is to get the world to believe that climate scientists are evil and the Energy Industialists are white knights out to save us? Good luck with that."

Yep. Those rich fat-cat scientists are out to ruin our public-spirited energy companies, just as they tanned the hides of those gosh-darned honest cigarette companies in years gone by. What is the world coming to?

:rolleyes:

[Al_U_Card]

Hopefully, the world is coming to the realization that "The love of money is the root of all evil." Profligate profits, gravy-train grants, taxes on simply breathing and speculative "investment" included.

[Winstonm]

The documentary Blue Gold argues a better case for water wars than the skeptics do for green greed.

[Al_U_Card]

There is agreement with the evil done by corporations, in the name of profit, especially when you see how they have adopted the green agenda. Previous references in this thread are clear that climate change is just the latest bogey-man.

Just look at the latest explanation for the recent lack of warming in the PNAS. Sulfate aerosols from China... what, they stopped burning coal from 1980 to 2000? Any excuse is good, as long as the cash is handed over. Green energy has more to do with the color of the cash involved than it does with the saving of the planet and its denizens.

[Al_U_Card]

OTOH that corporate influence has spread far and deeply into academia. Some climate scientists are less than happy viz Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. (from his blog):

 

The IPCC is now one train wreck after another. After being embarrassed by the spectacle of a Greenpeace energy scenario being elevated to top level prominence in a recent report on renewable energy by an IPCC author from Greenpeace, the IPCC compounds that error by trying to explain it away with information that is at best misleading if not just untrue.

 

In a letter to the Economist this week Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III (which produced the recent report on renewables) dresses down the magazine for not recognizing that the IPCC has procedures in place to deal with the possibility that authors might impose their biases:

The IPCC has now approved a formal policy on conflicts of interest as recommended by the InterAcademy Council, a network of national science councils. This is an already endorsed increment in a pervasive system and is not a first step in a whole new area. Our new special report on renewables continues the tradition of balanced, thorough assessments at the IPCC.

What Edenhofer does not mention is that the IPCC conflict of interest policy is not being implemented until some time after 2014, after the current (fifth) assessment report is done (of course, nor did it apply to the recent renewables report). The yet-to-be-implemented COI policy is completely irrelevant to any discussion of the renewables report.

 

The IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri explained the reason for the delayed implementation recently to the Economist:

Of course if you look at conflict of interest with respect to authors who are there in the 5th Assessment Report we’ve already selected them and therefore it wouldn’t be fair to impose anything that sort of applies retrospectively.

If you think about it, fairness to IPCC authors who have conflicts of interest (most notably Pachauri himself) is an interesting concept. One might argue that the legitimacy of the organization outweighs a need for such fairness to conflicted authors, but I digress.

 

The IPCC involves many sincere people who put forth a lot of effort. It is a shame to see that effort repeatedly scuppered on the inability of the IPCC leadership to recognize that trust and legitimacy are essential to its job. When will the climate science community stand up and demand more effective leadership?

[Al_U_Card]

He's b-a-a-a-a-a-c-k... Viscount Monckton of Brenchley clearly demonstrates why the Australian government push for a "price" on "carbon pollution" is counter-productive in the extreme. Lots of graphs and explanations of the ineffectiveness of policy, using the government's own numbers. I wouldn't want to be an Aussie tax-payer, should this scheme come to fruition. A 7 part video series but it is well worth the watch.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYxFsDXaOCc&feature=related

[luke warm]

damn australians have always been troublemakers... they're too damn independent for my one-world, buffetesque tastes

[Al_U_Card]

As the potential poster-child for the greening of a national economy, (Spain is a sort of one-dimensional experiment but not really conclusive, as they are only a bit deeper in their hole because of it.) perhaps Australia will be the test case that provides the proof of just how viable the precautionary principle is and, either way, provide a cautionary tale for all those interested in learning that particular lesson.

[PassedOut]

"Climategate" Scientists Cleared of Wrongdoing - Again

 

Once again, Dr. Michael Mann and other climate scientists have been investigated by a third party to see if there was any wrongdoing in the “Climategate” scandal. And once again, they were cleared of any wrongdoing. They had been previously cleared by an International Panel of Scientists last year, by a panel at Penn State, and have been cleared by various other agencies as well. This time, the investigation was conducted by the National Science Foundation, and you can read the report in full here. Like the other investigations, the NSF found no evidence of falsifying data, manipulation of data, or destruction of data by Dr. Michael Mann or any of the climate research scientists based at the University of East Anglia.

Was waiting for Al to point this out.

 

Next?

[luke warm]

well he does have a good point re: australia... i guess we'll see

[Al_U_Card]

I would expect that the next step will be to have a legal procedure involving a jury of his peers and not his peer-reviewers... :ph34r:

 

Now, while this may seem repetitive, each of the "reviews" was by an interested party. So, until we have something resembling an impartial adjudication, I will continue to reserve judgement on his use of various "tricks" to "hide the decline".

 

In the last 6 months, more and more peer-reviewed studies have refuted or corrected major tenets of the "anthropogenic" meme. From ocean-current effects to cosmic-ray influence on cloud nucleation, the "settled" science gets more and more unsettled. That is science and not agenda nor belief. The current global cooling (relative to the last several thousand years) came just a few decades too soon for the global warming crowd. Their models are in disarray and their bombastic and argumentative refusals to recognize reality have ceased to hold any sway in the scientific community. Agenda is all that is left and that will soon be on the back-burner as well.

[mike777]

first, we have been lucky so far.

 

Regardless of how accurate the prevailing climate models are carbon-dioxide emissions from technology must, eventually, increase the temperature, which must, eventually, be harmful. Just think if this disaster hit a 100 years ago.

 

With that said this seems to be a challenge that is highly susceptible to automation.

 

Second point is that supercomputers simulations make conditional predictions, the economic forecasts make almost pure prophecies. I expect that the future of human responses to clmiate to depend heavily on how successful people are at creating new knowledge to address the problems that arise. Lets not compare predictions with prophecies.

 

 

 

 

third point is it is not yet accurately known how sensitive the atmosphere's temperature is to the concentration of carbon dioxide, that is how much a given increase in concentration increases the temperature.

 

This number is important politically, because it affects how urgent the problem is. This results in the political debate being dominated by the side issue of how 'anthropegenic' the increase in temperature to date has been.

 

As David Deutsch put it it is as if people were arguing about how best to prepare for the next hurricane while all agreeing that the only hurricanes one should prepare for are human-induced ones.

 

(some of these ideas from notes from David Deutsch)

[Winstonm]

"Climategate" Scientists Cleared of Wrongdoing - Again

 

 

Was waiting for Al to point this out.

 

Next?

 

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

 

ECHO...ECHo...ECho...Echo...echo...

Now batting,atting,atting,atting, Pedro, pedro, edro, edro, Bourbon, bon, bon, bon, bon...

[Al_U_Card]

Nigel Calder was an editor for New Scientist and has been a science writer for a long time. In a post on WUWT concerning the CERN CLOUD experiment and its significance for climate studies and modelling, he expresses a viewpoint with which I concur.

 

How the warmists built their dam

 

Shifting from my insider’s perspective on the CLOUD experiment, to see it on the broader canvas of the politicized climate science of the early 21st Century, the chief reaction becomes a weary sigh of relief. Although they never said so, the High Priests of the Inconvenient Truth – in such temples as NASA-GISS, Penn State and the University of East Anglia – always knew that Svensmark’s cosmic ray hypothesis was the principal threat to their sketchy and poorly modelled notions of self-amplifying action of greenhouse gases.

 

In telling how the obviously large influences of the Sun in previous centuries and millennia could be explained, and in applying the same mechanism to the 20th warming, Svensmark put the alarmist predictions at risk – and with them the billions of dollars flowing from anxious governments into the global warming enterprise.

 

For the dam that was meant to ward off a growing stream of discoveries coming from the spring in Copenhagen, the foundation was laid on the day after the Danes first announced the link between cosmic rays and clouds at a space conference in Birmingham, England, in 1996. “Scientifically extremely naïve and irresponsible,”Bert Bolin declared, as Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 

As several journalists misbehaved by reporting the story from Birmingham, the top priority was to tame the media. The first courses of masonry ensured that anything that Svensmark and his colleagues might say would be ignored or, failing that, be promptly rubbished by a warmist scientist. Posh papers like The Times of London and the New York Times, and posh TV channels like the BBC’s, readily fell into line. Enthusiastically warmist magazines like New Scientist and Scientific Americanneeded no coaching.

 

Similarly the journals Nature and Science, which in my youth prided themselves on reports that challenged prevailing paradigms, gladly provided cement for higher masonry, to hold the wicked hypothesis in check at the scientific level. Starve Svensmark of funding. Reject his scientific papers but give free rein to anyone who criticizes him. Trivialize the findings in the Holy Writ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. None of this is paranoia on my part, but a matter of close personal observation since 1996.

 

“It’s the Sun, stupid!” The story isn’t really about a bunch of naughty Danish physicists. They are just spokesmen for the most luminous agent of climate change. As the Sun was what the warmists really wanted to tame with their dam, they couldn’t do it. And coming to the Danes’ aid, by briefly blasting away many cosmic rays with great puffs of gas, the Sun enabled the team to trace in detail the consequent reduction in cloud seeding and liquid water in clouds. See my posthttp://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/do-clouds-disappear/ By the way, that research also disposes of a morsel of doubt in the new CLOUD paper, about whether the small specks made by cosmic rays really grow sufficiently to seed cloud droplets.

 

As knowledge accumulated behind their dam and threatened to overtop it, the warmists had one last course to lay. Paradoxically it was CLOUD. Long delays with this experiment to explore the microchemical mechanism of the Svensmark effect became the chief excuse for deferring any re-evaluation of the Sun’s role in climate change. When the microchemical mechanism was revealed prematurely by the SKY experiment in Copenhagen and published in 2006, the warmists said, “No particle accelerator? That won’t do! Wait for CLOUD.” When the experiment in Aarhus confirmed the mechanism using a particle accelerator they said, “Oh that’s just the Danes again! Wait for CLOUD.”

 

Well they’ve waited and their dam has failed them.

 

Hall of Shame

 

Retracing those 14 years, what if physics had functioned as it is supposed to do? What if CLOUD, quickly approved and funded, had verified the Svensmark effect with all the authority of CERN, in the early 2000s. What if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had done a responsible job, acknowledging the role of the Sun and curtailing the prophecies of catastrophic warming?

 

For a start there would have no surprise about the “travesty” that global warming has stopped since the mid-1990s, with the Sun becoming sulky. Vast sums might have been saved on misdirected research and technology, and on climate change fests and wheezes of every kind. The world’s poor and their fragile living environment could have had far more useful help than precautions against warming.

 

And there would have been less time for so many eminent folk from science, politics, industry, finance, the media and the arts to be taken in by man-made climate catastrophe. (In London, for example, from the Royal Society to the National Theatre.) Sadly for them, in the past ten years they’ve crowded with their warmist badges into a Hall of Shame, like bankers before the crash.

[Al_U_Card]

"Climategate" Scientists Cleared of Wrongdoing - Again

 

 

Was waiting for Al to point this out.

 

Next?

 

An alternate viewpoint by an otherwise interested party.

the thorn in the side of CAGW

[PassedOut]

Now that the charges against the so-called "climategate" scientists have proved unfounded, we can refocus upon where the actual frauds lie: Journal editor resigns over 'problematic' climate paper

 

The editor of a science journal has resigned after admitting that a recent paper casting doubt on man-made climate change should not have been published.

 

The paper, by US scientists Roy Spencer and William Braswell, claimed that computer models of climate inflated projections of temperature increase.

 

It was seized on by "sceptic" bloggers, but attacked by mainstream scientists.

 

Wolfgang Wagner, editor of Remote Sensing journal, says he agrees with their criticisms and is stepping down.

 

"Peer-reviewed journals are a pillar of modern science," he writes in a resignation note published in Remote Sensing.

 

"Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims.

 

"Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell... is most likely problematic in both aspects and should therefore not have been published."

The editor resigned, but Spencer is hunkering down. No money in retractions...

[Al_U_Card]

This is indeed a troubling situation. (At least as troubling as similar instances in pre-climategate times.)

 

I am not sure what the editor's expertise in satellite measurement is, or how he assayed the validity of the contents of the paper that the peer-reviewers signed off on... but certainly he has his reasons for resigning. What those motivations might be or where they originated remains to be seen. Now, like all journals and the peer-review process, refutations, corrigendums and retractions, if warranted, will surely follow.

 

Based on what I read from his resignation letter, it appears that he didn't realize that the paper refuted the arguments of the Trenberth paper that he stated was a reference source for his position. Most strange, since you would expect a refutation to disagree with what is being refuted.

[cherdano]

Based on what I read from his resignation letter, it appears that he didn't realize that the paper refuted the arguments of the Trenberth paper that he stated was a reference source for his position. Most strange, since you would expect a refutation to disagree with what is being refuted.

 

Maybe you should learn to read before trying to form your own opinion about climate change. The resignation letter clearly states that:

1. There had been studies similar to Spencer's before.

2. These had been refuted by Trenberth's paper, and in other discussions.

3. Spencer's paper ignored the refutation by Trenberth.

[Al_U_Card]

There is certainly quite a bit of buzz concerning this resignation although it has been further trumped by the response to the paper in question (Dessler 2011) that got written and reviewed in record time. Based on the changes that the author himself has started to make, based on Roy Spencer`s communication with him, perhaps those editors will resign for having let through a paper without sufficient review.....or does that only apply to skeptic papers and not rebuttals to them?

 

My previous post was the expression on my opinion of the editor`s motivations, especially when you consider the stated goals of that "open" journal, espoused and expressed by that same editor but a short time before as he took the editor`s position:

 

 

Remote Sensing journal is an Open Access journal and an online journal, with the Editorial Office located in Basel. It maintains a rapid editorial procedure and a rigorous peer-review system. Because it is an open access journal, papers published will receive very high publicity. The Remote Sensing Editorial team consists of trained scientists (Publisher: Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, PhD in Organic Chemistry from the ETH Zürich, and the Production Editor: Dr. Derek McPhee, California, USA)