I’ve been away for a couple of weeks and have been struck by the way in which the false deity of global warming (part of the unholy trinity made up by the “God of the Greater Good”, his son the “God of I know what’s good for you” and the underlying spirit of “Benevolent Fascism” which infuses this religious movement) is used by different people in a different ways to further their own aims. “Global warming” like “excess population” is merely a fashionable deity which will be worshipped for as long as it serves as a convenient label to suspend rational thought and justify the unjustifiable.
Posts Tagged ‘climate change’
New study shows solar minimum does cause climate cooling
May 7, 2012A new paper in Nature Geoscience shows that solar grand minima do indeed cause cooling of the climate in Europe. Around 2800 years ago, one of these Grand Solar Minima, the Homeric Minimum, caused a distinct climatic change in less than a decade in Western Europe. The forcing mechanisms still remain unclear but the evidence that solar effects are significant and cannot be ignored are mounting and persuasive. Now as we enter (or have already entered) a new solar minimum it remains to be seen as to whether this (Landscheidt?) Minimum will be a grand minimum to compare with the Maunder Minimum. In any event a period of global cooling seems likely.
In contrast, the evidence for any anthropogenic effects on climate is still non-existent though political and alarmist theories abound. There is as yet no direct evidence that man-made carbon dioxide emissions has any significant effect on global warming.
Regional atmospheric circulation shifts induced by a grand solar minimum by Celia Martin-Puertas, Katja Matthes, Achim Brauer, Raimund Muscheler, Felicitas Hansen, Christof Petrick, Ala Aldahan, Göran Possnert & Bas van Geel
Director of Max Planck Institute admits that climate models are “inconsistent with observations”
April 18, 2012Climate models – at best – are gross over-simplifications of the chaotic layer of atmosphere around the earth in which climate and weather manifest themselves. Solar effects, the effects of clouds, of volcanoes, of aerosols, of sulphur compounds, of ocean currents and of the winds can only be crudely modelled. There is no evidence that man-made carbon dioxide has any significant impact on weather or climate. No one really knows when and how ice ages come and go. The models use fudge factors galore and each only represents the imperfect understanding, the prejudices and the biases of the modeller. And yet IPCC and governments have got so caught up in their own smug rhetoric about the science being “settled” that they prefer to believe the model results even when they are “inconsistent with reality”.
P Gosselin reports on a new article by Michael Odenwald in the magazine “Focus” (in German).
Settled science? Karakoram glaciers, polar bear and emperor penguin numbers are all growing – not disappearing
April 16, 2012A settled science? Global warming was going to melt all the Himalayan glaciers by 2035, polar bears were going to be exterminated and emperor penguins populations were going to be devastated. But the climate models are proving to be just the wishful thinking of an alarmist creed.
1. The Guardian: The glaciers flowing between the towering peaks of the Karakoram range on the Pakistan-China border have grown in size in the last decade, according to new research. The impact of climate change on the ice in the greater Himalaya range has been controversial because of an unfounded claim by the United Nations’ climate science panel over the rate of melting in the region. However the melting of vast volumes of ice into the sea in most other parts of the world has been clearly demonstrated. In March, scientists showed that far less ice was being lost across the Himalayas than had been estimated from sparse ground surveys on the remote slopes.
The new study shows that glaciers in one important part of the mountain range are growing. “We provide a detailed glacier-scale evaluation of mass changes in the central Karakoram,” said Julie Gardelle, at CNRS-Université Grenoble, who led the research published in Nature Geoscience on Sunday. …
2. Polar bear populations have never been as large as they are now.
3. Emperor penguin populations are twice the size they were once thought to be.
It is time for the climate brigade and their hangers-on to develop a little humility and acknowledge that the chaotic, turbulent layer around the earth which creates our climate is far from being understood.
Time to ditch some of the models.
Ocean warming over last 135 years twice as great as over last 50 years
April 2, 2012This new paper just reinforces my view that man-made carbon dioxide is insignificant with regard to climate. But I wonder how this finding is somehow going to be attributed to anthropogenic carbon dioxide.
Painting of Challenger by William Frederick Mitchell - Wikipedia
A new study combining data from the HMS Challenger (1872 – 1876) with the the modern data set of the Argo Programme shows that ocean warming 135 years ago was significantly faster than that in the last 50 years.
“… the magnitude of the temperature change since the 1870s is twice that observed over the past 50 years. …. This implies that the time scale for the warming of the ocean is not just the last 50 years but at least the last 100 years.”
… the 100-year timescale of ocean warming implies that Earth’s climate system as a whole has been gaining heat for at least that long.
Dean Roemmich, W. John Gould, John Gilson. 135 years of global ocean warming between the Challenger expedition and the Argo Programme. Nature Climate Change, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1461
Summary: The ocean’s dominant role over the atmosphere, land, or cryosphere comes from its high heat capacity and ability to remove heat from the sea surface by currents and mixing. The longest interval over which instrumental records of subsurface global-scale temperature can be compared is the 135 years between the voyage of HMS Challenger (1872–1876) and the modern data set of the Argo Programme(2004–2010). Argo’s unprecedented global coverage permits its comparison with any earlier measurements. This, the first global-scale comparison ofChallenger and modern data, shows spatial mean warming at the surface of 0.59 °C±0.12, consistent with previous estimates of globally averaged sea surface temperature increase. Below the surface the mean warming decreases to 0.39 °C±0.18 at 366 m (200 fathoms) and 0.12 °C±0.07 at 914 m (500 fathoms). The 0.33 °C±0.14 average temperature difference from 0 to 700 m is twice the value observed globally in that depth range over the past 50 years, implying a centennial timescale for the present rate of global warming. Warming in the Atlantic Ocean is stronger than in the Pacific. Systematic errors in the Challenger data mean that these temperature changes are a lower bound on the actual values. This study underlines the scientific significance of the Challenger expedition and the modern Argo Programme and indicates that globally the oceans have been warming at least since the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century.
And if warming in the last 50 years was just half the rate of warming over the last 100 years it follows that warming in the first 50 years was 3 times greater than the rate in the second 50.
Climate Eugenics
March 13, 2012Another idiot paper from a supposed Professor of Philosophy at New York University who claims that “human engineering deserves further consideration in the debate about climate change”.
He gets paid for producing this drivel.
Human Engineering and Climate Change by S. MATTHEW LIAO (NEW YORK UNIVERSITY), ANDERS SANDBERG (OXFORD), and REBECCA ROACHE (OXFORD)
The Atlantic carries a long interview with the idiot philosopher (whose ego is revelling in the publicity):
… the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.
In your paper you suggest that some human engineering solutions may actually be liberty enhancing. How so?
Liao: That’s right. It’s been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China’s one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions—what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that’s the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.
Indeed! A family may wish to ensure that they don’t produce idiot children – large or small. Human engineering to breed out the possibility of producing idiot professors of philosophy could be more productive for the human race.
Cosmic rays could indeed seed clouds
March 2, 2012Sticking to science – and experimental science at that – while ignoring the politicisation and religious overtones of “climate science”, Henrik Svensmark continues to painstakingly build his cosmic theory of climate change.
Supernova remnants → cosmic rays → solar modulation of cosmic rays →variations in cluster and sulphuric acid production → variation in cloud condensation nuclei → variation in low cloud formation → variation in climate.
When experiments or observations show that model predictions are wrong it is time to ditch the falsified hypotheses and to build new hypotheses. Far too often in ” global warming science” the hypotheses and the models become “incontrovertible dogma” and rather than test the falsifiability of the hypothesis with observations and experiment, data are fudged to fit the dogma. Svensmark’s approach is an oasis of proper science in a desert of pseudo-science.
Fakegate and the enrichment of language
February 26, 2012Fakegate enriches language!
gleick, n, a vain and inept person
to gleick, v, to forge ineptly
Peter was a gleick, Peter is a gleick, Peter will always be a gleick.
Peter gleicked, Peter is gleicking, Peter will gleick.
It trips of the tongue very nicely.
Fakegate and Peter Gleick’s inept (but “heroic”) escapades are the source of much amusement over at Climate Audit. One reader, a Dr. UK has found a very apposite quotation from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Bottom (wearing the head of an ass): Nay, I can gleek upon occasion.
Titania:Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful.
But there are many contenders for the role of Titania! Monbiot and Laden lead the list.
To gleick, or not to gleick ..
Peter (soliloquy):
To gleick, or not to gleick, that is the question:
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Heartland,
Or to take Fakes against a Sea of Truths,
And by publishing end them:
(with apologies to WS)
Insurance Companies and alarmism
February 24, 2012Insurance companies are in the business of making perceived risks seem much larger than actual risk. Their profits are directly impacted by increasing the risk perceptions of the party seeking insurance. It is not surprising that they exaggerate the dangers of whatever is being insured against. To be “alarmist” for an insurance company is just good marketing. However much of their marketing and publicity is presented under the cloak of “scientific research”. Any report from an insurance company about future risks and purporting to be an “objective” or “scientific” study needs to be discounted and taken with a very large shovel of salt. Yet, the media often swallow such publicity and merely reproduce their reports with little effort to see through the conflicts of interest.
I have posted earlier about Munich Re and their attempts to suggest that global warming will increase the frequency of natural disasters. Anything to increase the perceptions of risk.
Now JunkScience reports on the case of Kerry Emanuel and his alarmist positions and his connections to Insurance companies:
Based on a request for investigation from JunkScience.com, Nature has forced MIT’s Kerry Emanuel to disclose his employment with insurance companies as a conflict of interest.
In the Feb. 14 Nature Climate Change study “Physically based assessment of hurricane surge threat under climate change,” of which Emanuel is a co-author, the “Additional Interests” section disclosed:
The authors declare no competing financial interests. However, in the interests of transparency we confirm that one of us, Kerry Emanuel, is on the boards of two property and casualty companies: Homesite and Bunker Hill, and also on the board of the AlphaCat Fund, an investment fund dealing with re-insurance transactions. In all three cases, Dr Emanuel receives fixed fees but owns no stocks or shares. Dr Emanuel does not stand to make any personal financial gain through these directorships as a consequence of the reported findings.
There was obvious reluctance in the disclosure from the wording (“no competing financial interests” even though insurance companies are gaming global warming alarmism) to the fact that, despite our asking, we had to find out about the disclosure on our own initiative — i.e., after our initial exchange with Nature, the journal editors stopped communicating with us.
JunkScience also reported that the Consumer Federation of America says in a new report:
…. Although insurers have become adept at shifting the cost of catastrophe losses to others, they still use catastrophic weather events to advocate for measures that would shift risk even more, such as higher rates, or putting more policyholders in pools or created taxpayer-supported entities. Thus, many consumers exposed to catastrophe weather risk are also vulnerable to insurer attempts to unjustifiably increase rates or hollow out coverage…
Fakegate: Climate Alarmists reduced to forgery, lying, cheating and stealing
February 23, 2012The Global Warming priesthood have long experience in fudging data, cheating and suppressing opposing views. But Peter Gleick, a true acolyte of the religion, has now been reduced not only to lying, cheating and stealing but also to forgery and fakery.
The blogosphere has been full of the Fakegate or the Peter Gleick affair for the last week. First he used impersonation and lying to extract confidential documents from Heartland. He clearly has broken some laws. But he found nothing very damaging regarding climate sceptics so he forged a “summary” document so as to be able to add some spice to the affair. He then disseminated the documents widely and these were immediately publicised by a gullible and hypocritical orthodoxy.
Peter Gleick - Faker
Of course Gleick is a climate alarmist and activist and for him and his friends Heartland remains the “villain” and his ends of “exposing” the alleged bad guys apparently justifies his dishonest and criminal means. His authorship of the forged document was recognised by Steven Mosher and Climate Audit just from his writing style and bad punctuation. Needless to say Gleick is considered by the global warming priesthood as an expert exponent of integrity in science research. In this sordid case some are delusional enough to see him as a hero.
Gleick’s own work is unimportant and lacking any real scientific content. His lack of ethics (apart from his poor writing and general incompetence) is of no great significance. But his behaviour exposes and is in the tradition established by the Hockey Stick crowd (Mann, Jones, Hansen, Trenberth et al) of fudging and cheating and suppression of opposing views.
Megan McArdle gives Mosher and the blogosphere props for pointing to Gleick
Peter Gleick Confesses to Obtaining Heartland Documents Under False Pretenses
FakeGate: Just Another Day at Team Green
Fakegate Illustrates Global Warming Alarmists’ Deceit and Desperation
The k2p blog 