Barrel Strength

The New York Times is losing its climate science (should I call that phlogiston?) reporter. Andy Revkin has been a major corrupting influence on climate news. The climategate files reveal him to have been a willing collaborator with Jones, Trenberth, Briffa, Mann, Gavin Schmidt, et al.

I do hope readers will investigate phlogiston, while they are reading this. Our current understanding is that burning is the process of rapid oxidation, based on the work of Carl Scheele, Joseph Priestly and Antoine Lavoisier in the 1770s.  Prior to that time, it was supposed that “phlogiston” was the substance that was released when things burned. Accordingly, what remained after burning was supposed to be lighter than the substance before burning. However, exceptions were found to this rule. The ash (the oxides) of some substances were heavier , which meant that the phlogiston theory was wrong.

I see many parallels between phlogiston theory and man-caused global warming. Both were broadly believed, seemed plausible, and had scientific defenders.

Both turned out to be erroneous inferences from observed facts: things burn, atmospheric CO2 is rising. The facts are facts but the theories to explain them were rubbish.

The basic idea is that the rise of atmospheric CO2 concentration is supposed to  drive climate change. Nothing else does, according to the alarmist theory: not solar radiation, not cosmic rays, not cloud formation, not water vapor in the atmosphere, not ocean currents or undersea vulcanism, not plate tectonics, not the position of the solar system wheeling through dust clouds in the galaxy – not anything at all except human made CO2.

(Does imputing a single and exclusive cause to global warming not seem odd to you?)

If atmospheric CO2 continues to rise, but the temperature does not, then CO2 does not drive the climate. Years of “science”, billions of dollars spent in scaring everyone, and bubble reputations go up in smoke.

If CO2 does not drive the climate, then the man-caused global warming a mistake and, at some level, a fraud.

Remember also, we skeptics do not have to explain anything. We do not have to have a theory of climate change. Antarctica could melt to morrow and it would be a disaster. The relevant political question is: did we contribute to it? The answer is no. Not if the rise of CO2 concentrations follow rather than precede global warming.

 As long as human activity has not caused them, we do not have exlain or defend climate changes.

When the mockery reaches this stage, it cannot be long now.

The fellow in charge of the American Physical Society’s review of the dangers of anthropogenic global warming has received $20 million for research on the topic and a further $2 million a year from British Petroleum.

Declan McCullough reports:

“The scientist who will head the American Physical Society’s review of its 2007 statement calling for immediate reductions of carbon dioxide is Princeton’s Robert Socolow, a prominent supporter of the link between CO2 and global warming who has warned of possible “catastrophic consequences” of climate change.

“Socolow’s research institute at Princeton has received well over $20 million in grants dealing with climate change and carbon reduction, plus an additional $2 million a year from BP and still more from the federal government. In an interview published by Princeton’s public relations office, Socolow called CO2 a “climate problem” that governments need to address. ”

Any wonder that climate science is becoming a by-word for corruption? And look who is taking money from big oil!

But where is the Danish resistance?

In a rambling rank admission of the growing political endurance of Stephen Harper, ageing typist Lawrence Martin fails to answer a critical question: what is Lawrence Martin’s “safe word”?

Klavan: “Shame and guilt and self-hatred are universal.  Whether you chalk it up to original sin or to Oedipus or call it Jewish guilt or Catholic guilt or white guilt or black guilt, every single one of us knows he is not the person he was made to be.  There are honest ways to confront that.  You can kneel before God and pray for forgiveness and live in the joy of his love.  Or you can drink heavily and make sardonic remarks until you destroy everyone you care about and then keel over dead – that’s honest too. 

“But what a lot of people do is try to escape their sense of shame dishonestly by constructing elaborate moral frameworks that allow them to parade their virtue and their lavish repentance without any real inconvenience to themselves while simultaneously indulging in self-righteousness by condemning others for their impenitent evil. 

“That’s the bad version of religion – the sort of religion Jesus came to dismantle.  And that’s exactly the sort of religion leftism is:  an elaborate system for hiding shame behind a cheap mask of virtue. 

“That’s why they demonize any opposition.  To them, we’re not just disagreeing with them, we’re threatening to tear off the mask of their virtue and reveal them to themselves.  Which, without God or sufficient whiskey, would be unbearable.

Andrew Klavan is a screenwriter, crime novelist, and former atheist.

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/tiger-woods-index.html

The method used divided webpage lookups by media articles, or pages.  (The author is British).

“Using the TWI (Tiger Woods Index) as a comparator, the public in general are more interested in “Climategate” than Tiger Woods, by a factor of nearly 20 times.

“Applying the “ratio analysis” (doesn’t that sound grand!) to ten current issues, including the two already mentioned, an arbitrary list emerged, ranked by importance to the general public, against media interest. This is as follows:

1. Climategate: 28,400,000 – 2,930 = 9693
2. Afghanistan: 143,000,000 – 154,145 = 928
3. Obama: 202,000,000 – 252,583 = 800
4. Tiger Woods: 22,500,000 – 46,025 = 489
5. Gordon Brown: 12,300,000 – 37,021 = 332
6. Climate change: 22,200,000 – 68,419 = 324
7. Sally Bercow: 25,000 – 86 = 290
8. David Cameron: 545,000 – 4837 = 113
9. Meredith Kercher: 261,000 – 3,471 = 75
10. Chilcot Inquiry: 125,000 – 4,350 = 29

The author says that a statistician might fault him but that, unlike Micahel Mann, his methods and date are open to public insepction.

The method allows for infinite expansion. It allows for a possibly consistent measure of public interest versus newspaper (media) interest. More work needs to be done on this, because it is a simple measure of the frequent gap between popular interest in a topic and the newspaper’s interest.

Warning:

If you read these global temperature charts, covering the last 400,000 years, your mind will be changed.

No discussion of the world’s climate should be in terms less than a thousand years at a time.

The same chart appears in Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, showing that we are now in the sixth interglacial in a 400,000 year long ice age. The ice will be back.

News you might have missed if your only news source is CBC.

Obama’s risky-sex czar

Education official involved in teaching 14-year-olds strange sex techniques

The Obama administration is stonewalling serious inquiries about sexual filth propagated by a senior presidential appointee who is responsible for promoting and implementing federal education policy. Democrats clearly are terrified of ruffling the feathers of their activist homosexual supporters, who are an influential part of the Democratic party’s base. This scandal, however, is not merely about homosexual behavior; it is about promoting sex between children and adults – and it’s time for President Obama to make clear that abetting such illegal perversion has no place in his administration….

The issue is: why is there a law available by which these people could be prosecuted? Why is a domestic spat in a hotel the source of criminal prosecution?

“Explaiing his reasons for dismissing the case, he said Mrs Tazi’s claim that she was verbally attacked by the couple for up to an hour had not been borne out by other prosecution witnesses, who suggested that any discussions lasted around seven minutes.”

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, makes an interesting case for the precautionary principle today. That is, if we believed there were a 1% chance that Al Qaeda had nukes, we would act as if they had nukes. Same with global warming. If there were a 1% chance we were causing it, we should act as if it were true. “A low probability, high-impact event.”

Friedman’s argument is as follows:

“We know that our planet is enveloped in a blanket of greenhouse gases that keep the Earth at a comfortable temperature. As we pump more carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse gases into that blanket from cars, buildings, agriculture, forests and industry, more heat gets trapped.

“What we don’t know, because the climate system is so complex, is what other factors might over time compensate for that man-driven warming, or how rapidly temperatures might rise, melt more ice and raise sea levels. It’s all a game of odds. We’ve never been here before. We just know two things: one, the CO2 we put into the atmosphere stays there for many years, so it is “irreversible” in real-time (barring some feat of geo-engineering); and two, that CO2 buildup has the potential to unleash “catastrophic” warming. Read the rest…

Bill Bell, do you you have a PayPal account?

<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/citizens-buying-advertising-against-climate-change-politics/>

Declan McCullagh at CBSNews.com may be the only mainstream journalist covering the only real climate story – fortunately, he is excellent.

Nothing like a little betrayal for that second morning hangover.

In his letter from Copenhagen, Michael M’Gonigle, formerly a lawyer for Greenpeace, argues that the Copenhagen Treaty should fail, essentially because it cannot go far enough:

“The only outcome that matters in the end is on how we can redirect this new energy to where it actually needs to be — from the partial restraints of Copenhagen to full blown eco-conversion. Copenhagen is a story of many contradictions, but the need to “lose” at Copenhagen in order to expand the momentum for this conversion is the biggest of the bunch.”

M’Gonigle argues that the proposed treaty will set minimums (reductions of CO2 emissions)  that will inevitably become maximums, so that the lowest common denominator of all countries becomes the maximum that any one of them is bound by treaty to achieve.

“One last lesson: even minimal targets are meant to be missed. We have seen this with the Kyoto Protocol.”

M’Gonigle continues:

“If you were to pass around a single piece of information at Copenhagen, it should be the two pages of graphs at the beginning of an interesting book written by Gus Speth, this generation’s leading environmental bureaucrat in Washington D.C. The book is The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Speth sets out 16 hockey stick graphs that portray increases in water use, in the damning of rivers, in CO2 concentrations, ozone depletion (hopefully now slowing down), rates of increase in average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, the rising frequency of great floods, depletion of ocean ecosystems, loss of rainforests, biodiversity decline, increases in fertilizer and paper consumption, and the explosion in the number of motor vehicles.

“And three others: growth in the size of the global economy (GDP), foreign direct investment, and population.

“Together, these graphs — all hockey sticks — provide a single message. We are killing the earth in every way imaginable, getting rich in the process, and providing a model for a growing world population to join in on.”

You can agree or disagree with the observation that “we are killing the earth in every way imaginable”. The points I am making about this letter from Copenhagen are that:

1) no sooner is the CO2 scandal exposed than the topic changes; and

2) not all of these problems are imaginary. Some, in fact, are based on real events, such as ocean fish depletion, deforestation, and riverine pollution. Do you remember cod?

But to the extent that public attention shifts to possibly real problems and away from certainly unreal ones, we might  all, just possibly, benefit.