Barrel Strength

My point from the other day about the gap in time between when the global warming scam was exposed, and the ongoing drivel of electoral politics, is illustrated by a comment by the Liberal energy critic in a House of Commons natural resources committee yesterday:

Liberal natural resources critic David McGuinty on Tuesday highlighted Redford’s call for a national energy strategy, saying she’s raising some important questions about where the country is headed on energy development.

However, what has been absent from the discussion so far, is how greenhouse gas reductions will be factored into any pan-Canadian approach, he said.

“Is it possible that we would have a national energy policy or strategy, without addressing greenhouse gases?” McGuinty told the Tory-dominated House of Commons natural resources committee.”

Of course,  any energy policy focussed on greenhouse gases would not be an energy policy, it would be a policy predicated on a superstition, like a witchcraft policy, or obsolete scientific conceptions, like phlogiston. What is the federal government doing about phlogiston? Nothing. It does not exist.

And for those who may be unaware, the Liberal energy critic in the federal parliament is the brother of the Ontario Premier in the provincial legislature, the one who is pursuing a disastrous policy of windmill generation, shutting down coal plants,  and higher prices for consumers.

I have to keep reminding myself of Duggan’s Dew’s comment: “Dalwhinnie! 100 is the average IQ, not the bottom!”.

The anthropogenic global warming fraud is the subject of today’s commentary.

The issue for me is the time gap between the first real evidence the thing was a fraud, and the abandonment of policies in places like Ontario that were predicated on a global warming that is not happening, and if happening, not caused by man’s CO2 emissions.

I cite, for example, the comment by Falsum to the blog posting Inconvenient Facts posted yesterday. The report by scientists appeared in the Daily Mail. Falsum wrote:

The Daily Mail? Seriously? That newspaper has slightly less credibility than the average 14 year-old youtube commenter. The scientific community is agreed that global warming is real, that we are causing it, and that it will be catastrophic if we do not do anything.

Hack journalism does nothing to change that. Try again when you find an article in a reputable peer-reviewed journal.

 What the  article said – which evidently Falsum did not bother to read, was that the British Met Office had realeased the data. The first paragraphs were:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

The East Anglia Climate Research Unit is the source of the Climategate email hacking scandal.

In Falsum we find the complete believer, confident that the science is on his side, and not afraid to say so. The last time he thought through the issue must have been four or five years ago, because he has missed everything since.

 What has fascinated me is the several-year-long gap between the first publication of the emails that showed the whole thing was a vicious academic game played for keeps (Climategate 1, in 2009), and the spread of this realization slowly slowly through the intelligentsia until now.

Consider Ontario for example, where the provincial government has been pursuing a policy spending billions on wind farms and coal plant shutdowns, paid for by large increases in electricity rates. The opposition leader Tim Hudak dare not attack the theory behind Premier McGuinty’s folly because to do so would offend the state of believed ignorance in the Ontario media.

Wikipedia entries on the subject of Climategate are fully controlled by warmists to this day.

Climategate 1 occurred in 2009. It exposed all the doubts and lack of facts of the perpetrators of the carboin myth for all to see. A cascade of toothless inquiries since, led by warmists,  has exonerated the perpetrators.

 Yet anyone with a few hours of time on their hands and the inclination to read into a subject can find convenient summaries of the emails in question.

We are in the presence of a believed mythology. Man bad. Gaia good. Spaceship earth being plundered and ravaged by insensitive male boors. Imminent doom from CO2 emissions. Redemption through atonement to Gaia.

It took many decades for communism to be exposed.

Capitalism bad. Capitalists evil. Working man good. All power to the working man through the revolutionary appartus of the Party. The Party knows the outcome of history, and it must temporarily assume dictatorial powers, but only until the work of socialism is complete, when we shall all be free and equal and living in a man-created paradise.

Communism had the advantage of a huge captive state, a ruthless regime of terror and victory in WW2. It was a vastly successful ideology that held a third of the world in thrall to a primitive Gnostic superstition. It lingers in North Korea, which is a theme park of xenophobic failure and starvation.

By contrast the climate thing has all the features of leftism without the bother of Marxist economic claptrap. The climate thing carries on with its own regime of intimidation inside universities, hysteria in the media, mathematical modeling that is fact-free and cannot even predict the past, and government subsidies. Its influence today vies with communism in the 1930s. Will it die soon, or will it take another few decades for most average informed people to realize it was a scam?

 And will it die suddenly, or just peter out?

 That the whole warmist fantasy will fail is not in doubt. But the average person of good conscience has neither the time nor the motivation to inquire too deeply into it, and so drastically mistaken measures are undertaken in all western economies by fools like McGuinty on  behalf of Gaianism, the latest Gnostic outbreak.

We can only hope that the learning cycle will be faster and less murderous this time with Gaianism than it was with communism.

The earth has not warmed in 15 years. The Daily Mail reports

“The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.“

I used to think that there was global warming – just a bit, but that we were not causing it. Now it seems that even that idea is false.

The warmists have a severe problem: how to climb down from their apocryphal predictions. It has to be done carefully. They are starting to realize, even inside the cult, that the world is not warming fast enough, and that the attempts to hide global warming inside deep ocean currents , as was suggested by a prominent warmist a couple of months ago, are failing to persuade. The faithful are slipping away.

They know they have to contend with the irregular recurrence of ice ages. They know, to the extent any science reaches them, that the earth is in an ice age, and we are in an interglacial period, shortly to come to an end.

The narrative has to be modulated. Ice ages. Global warming. How do they  reconcile the narratives?

Easy!

Global warming is delaying the onset of the next ice age! So says Dr. Luke Skinner of Cambridge University.

Says the Beeb Magazine:

“In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years – but emissions have been so high that it will not.

You are wondering: do I assume this is all centrally directed? By “this” I denote the studies and the media treatment of studies, more especially.

It amuses me to think that all this panic mongering is centrally directed,  no such assumption is necessary.

I think that the media’s treatment of man-caused global warming is like the case reported by Malcom Muggeridge, when he worked for the Guardian in the 1930s. He shouted down the hall to the senior editor “what’s our line on corporal punishment?”. The call came back “Same as capital punishment, only more so!”.

Something of the same nature is occurring in the media. First there is a Line on the issue. The Party Line. The party line exists easily even without the communist Party, because the tendency to leftism is eternal. Out with Marxism, in with Spaceship Earth and Global Warming.

Next, the Party Line has to change. Why? All the climate gate email hacks showed that the scientists (Trenberth, Briffa, Mann et al) were vicious little shits proclaiming anathema on their critics but seriously concerned they could not prove what they were insisting upon. Too much slowly accumulating evidence that AGW is either not happening, not happening fast enough, or that CO2 is not the cause of climate cycles.

Moving off the Party Line has to be done carefully, but it can be done boldly so long as the Party moves smartly and pretends it never thought any differently. In this case, CO2 is being blamed for slowing  the inevitable advent of the next ice age, as if this were a bad thing.

The loss in clarity of the narrative is apparent – that CO2 is not wholly bad – but the gain may be worth it. The clarity gained is to introduce to the faithful that ice ages occur. The science has to be fed to them bit by bit, lest they freak out when they realize how badly they have been conned.

Thus it is imperative when enough people at cocktail parties start to talk about ice ages and Milankovich cycles, and the warmist  faithful are being assaulted by too many well-informed skeptics telling them they are full of shit, then they must be informed of just enough science to make them comfortable again. CO2 bad! Bad humans! Bad! Gaia is angry!

I am not sure whether the Line is centrally directed, or whether it behaves as if it is. Your thoughts would be welcomed.

The Vicar of the Glebe, the Venerable Archdeacon Jeffrey Simpson, has discovered that Canadians believe least in the man-made origins of global warming:

According to a recent international poll, Canada has the highest number of citizens (22 per cent) of any economically advanced country who deny that human activity causes global warming. We can fairly presume the vast majority of this 22 per cent are in what we might loosely call the conservative world in Canada. They read the anti-global-warming newspapers and commentators, and they rely on the handful of academics who debunk global warming.

If, despite the billions that governments have invested in the global warming scare, and the relentless stream of warmist propaganda, Canadians are least persuaded, perhaps it has something to do with the five months a year in which they have to heat their houses and put on hats, gloves, coats, and sweaters, just to go outside and scrape ice or snow of the windshield.

10,000 years ago this place had the same climate as Baffin Island, and 10,000 years from now it will have returned to that state, unless AGW is real and effective. Let us hope so, but if I am right, all the heating of the world by man that has occurred in the past 150 years will avail naught. Our descendants will be living in Tennessee, and over-wintering in southern Mexico.

Anthropogenic global warming will soon join phlogiston in the scrap heap of ludicrous ideas.

“Pope says Mass at Easter.” Most headlines are of this sort. They tell us that the world is still in the same place as it was yesterday.  Other examples: “Fresh trouble in the Arab world”. “Seas rising because of global warming!” “Weather worse because of global warming”. They join the 35 other global warming hysteria headlines this month. For forty years we heard of IRA bombings in Northern Ireland and England; it was news when it stopped.

But this week we read headlines which may be of fundamental importance. The second experiment has demonstrated that neutrinos have moved faster than light. If this proves to be true and not merely the artefact of the experiment or observational bias, then the foundations of physics have just taken a five megaton hit.

So what is staying the same this month?

Eurozone crisis - same, but worsening.

Islamic inability to behave democratically? – same, but the evidence keeps coming in, all of which is ignored in the MSM picture of the world.

[Man-caused] global warming hysteria – the nails keep being driven in to that coffin, but the zombie keeps escaping.

My apologies to readers – job pressures have kept me from blogging lately. Happy is the blogger with a day job.

It always comes down to this: some corporal tells his privates to burn a village, and drive off the inhabitants, for some God-damned idiotic cause, so he can report to his sargeant that the enemy has been engaged and defeated.

This time it is global warming.

I am not making this up.

As the New York Times reports:

“Across Africa, some of the world’s poorest people have been thrown off land to make way for foreign investors, often uprooting local farmers so that food can be grown on a commercial scale and shipped to richer countries overseas.

“But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.”

When I use the term “global warming”, please understand that I mean “gigantic evil fraud akin to communism”.

People can murder millions with joy in the hearts, and global warming fanaticism is teaching this lesson once again.

Today’s comical headline in the Globe says “Scientists tout deep oceans as hiding spot for ‘missing’ heat”.
The author, our old friend Kevin Trenberth of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, and companion in arms of the Climategate crowd, had the task of explaining where the missing global warming has gone.

If the climate is warming but there is no measurable increase of heat in the atmosphere (I invite you to contemplate that statement carefully) then the heat must go somewhere. Conveniently, Mr. Trenberth ran some computer simulations and, voilà!, found that it was trapped in layers of the oceans deeper than 305 meters.

Does anyone find it suspicious that the air, which has not heated, was able to transfer millions or trillions of joules of energy to water below 305 meters?

Have you ever tried to heat water with hot air?

Does anyone find it suspicious that one of the principal proponents of global warming has run a computer simulation and found his missing heat?

Does anyone find it suspicious that an atmospherical scientist has something fundamental to report on deep ocean currents?

The five simulations run by the team “all indicated global temperature would rise several degrees this century. But all of them also showed periods when temperatures would stabilize before rising. During these periods, the extra heat moved into deep ocean water due to changes in ocean circulation, the scientists said.”

Does anyone start to see a relationship between missing heat and prophecies of the rapture and the second coming of Christ? The computers/Bibles are consulted. The desired outcome is generated. The faithful are comforted, and can look forward to the Apocalypse when the righteous shall be separated from the sinful.

Who said secular humanists do not have religion?

In the manner of Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s film critic who once admitted that she had not known anyone who voted for Reagan, I confess to not knowing anyone socially who takes global warming seriously.

I have a few cousins who believe it profoundly, but they are all Liberals and I avoid discussing any topic of controversy with true believers.

Probably by a natural process of affinity I have removed myself from the presence of such people, as I am too obnoxious, too condescending, and most of all, too knowledgeable about the geologic history of earth to be endured by warmists. They find it very hard to endure hearing of recent ice-ages, previous global warmings, and higher carbon dioxide concentrations tens of millions of years ago than exist now.
Yet you have surely noticed that, in the past year, the number of people of – shall we call them the informed classes- who espouse imminent eco-doom has declined? Have you noticed that pompous warmists have fallen silent?

Anthropogenic global warming was the largest, most sustained, best funded, and most persistent popular delusion since Marxism. It satisfied all elements of a pernicious metaphor – spaceship Earth. On spaceship Earth resources are always limited, and humans are always exhausting those limited resources because we are greedy, and we have not heeded the wisdom of Gaia.

Humans could not survive 6 weeks in open air without clothes, hunting gear, shelters and fire. Neither did our ancestors. That is why they developed sewing, hunting, fishing, farming, fire-making, and every other art conducive to survival and predominance. They knew they had to master their environments, not just live within them. Gazelles live within their environments. Look what happens to gazelles. If you do not want to end up as someone’s food, you had best keep a sharp lookout, travel in groups, belong to powerful clans, wield weapons, have a reputation for bravery and cunning, and have an exhaustive knowledge of plants, animals, and water sources. The automation of these functions by industrialization has permitted a great number of foolish people to walk about thinking otherwise, and still survive.

The second reason anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was so successful was that it fulfilled the aspirations of bureaucrats to manage the economy without accountability for results. It was a central planners’ dream come true, and unlike the Marxist version of central planning, all the AGW bureaucracy would need to do was to reduce living standards. They would not even have to have pretended to improve them.

“How shall we lower living standards today, Mr. Secretary?”
“Same way as always, boy. Tell them they are too rich and reduce their carbon dioxide emission quotas”.
“Aye aye, Mr. Secretary.”

Plus, the cap and trade idea was a wholly corrupt system whereby brokers would seize the scarcity rents of carbon emission quotas before the public treasury saw any of the money. To repeat, as government would have lowered carbon emission quotas, the remaining quotas would have become more valuable. But would governments have realized the benefits of these scarcities (resource rents)? Not at all. The traders in emissions quotas would have garnered all the increase of value, if value is the right term for the licence to burn fuel. And who might these brokers have been? The same people who brought you the recent financial crisis.
What happened? The Climategate leak of emails showed that the high-priests of AGW were engaged in massive cover-up of evidentiary gaps, vicious character assassinations, and unscientific group-think. The fact that there were only two observatories of global temperature in all the planet, and that billions if not trillions of dollars of investment would be shaped on the basis of fraudulent science conducted in one of them, shocked people into awareness.

Ultimately the global warmists could not control the discourse sufficiently to produce the results that would have justified the socialization of our economies. If there had been robust evidence that global temperatures were increasing, that CO2 concentrations were going up, that these were preponderantly caused by human activity and not natural forces, and that other causes: sun, cloud cover, did not play a role, the AGW scare might have had some strength.

Average global temperature has been rising since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850. CO2 concentration has been increasing. The problem with warmist science was that the causal linkage between CO2 concentration and rising global temperature was assumed; computer modeling replaced observation, hypothesis and testing. The geological and glaciological history of earth was ignored, and contrary evidence suppressed. Many a career was sidelined by the relentless pressure to conform to the Prevailing Doctrine. Yet despite the calumny by warmists of their opponents, the massive distortion of funding to “prove” what could not be demonstrated, and the relentless propaganda, the warmist cause is in deep disarray. No wonder Al Gore is off his rocker.

Remember the famous quote by VP Joe Biden?

“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

Well now you can add this to the list of dumb remarks.

Smoke belching from Asia’s rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming in the decade after 1998 because of sulphur’s cooling effect, even though greenhouse gas emissions soared, a U.S. study said on Monday.

Yes, you read that right. Global warming, which was caused by air pollution, is now being stopped by the same air pollution.

David Evans, scientist and former global warming believer, recants officially.

“There are now several independent pieces of evidence showing that the earth responds to the warming due to extra carbon dioxide by dampening the warming. Every long-lived natural system behaves this way, counteracting any disturbance. Otherwise the system would be unstable. The climate system is no exception, and now we can prove it.

“But the alarmists say the exact opposite, that the climate system amplifies any warming due to extra carbon dioxide, and is potentially unstable. It is no surprise that their predictions of planetary temperature made in 1988 to the U.S. Congress, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2001, have all proved much higher than reality.

“They keep lowering the temperature increases they expect, from 0.30C per decade in 1990, to 0.20C per decade in 2001, and now 0.15C per decade — yet they have the gall to tell us “it’s worse than expected.” These people are not scientists. They overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide, selectively deny evidence, and now they conceal the truth.”

Have you heard anyone known to you personally in the past six months seriously argue in favour of man-caused global warming? Or is it just David Suzuki on state television?

James Delingpole, an obnoxious right wing punk who happens to be right about everything, beat the rap for saying that the global warming catastrophists were full of shit.

Maybe the sound of Britain these days is the sound of a toilet flushing, but there are still somesigns of hope…..and change.

“The Commission has previously ruled [North v The Guardian] that “In the realm of blogging (especially in cases touching upon controversial topics such as climate change), there is likely to be strong and fervent disagreement, with writers making use of emotive terms and strident rhetoric. This is a necessary consequence of free speech. The Commission felt that it should be slow to intervene in this, unless there is evidence of factual inaccuracy or misleading statement.”

Would that our own domestic speech controllers were as clear about the consequences of free speech.

Global warming, wind power and the euro: three fantasies in various stages of decomposition, or exploding into reality. A fine read.

Hats off to Christopher Booker in the Telegraph.

For example:

“Back in the 1970s, when this was first talked of, Sir Donald McDougall, a senior Treasury official, was commissioned by Brussels to produce a report on “The Role of Public Finance in European Integration”. He warned that economic and monetary union could only work if Europe was in effect given an economic government, with the power to dispose of between 25 per cent and 40 per cent of Europe’s GDP. This was because, as he foresaw, one of the core problems would be that if weaker countries were deprived of the power to set their own interest rates or to devalue, they would require a massive injection of resources from richer countries. Which, of course, is just what we now see being acted out in the desperate efforts to bail out Portugal, following in the wake of Greece and Ireland – with Spain, bigger than all three put together, possibly to follow.

“As McDougall and many after him warned, the single currency could only work on conditions which the builders of a united Europe blithely chose to ignore, in pursuit of their make-believe. As a result, its collision with reality is now coming about, threatening a disintegration of the eurozone that could tug much of the European dream after it.”

Almost all measures and predictions of further global warming are derived from models which generate extrapolations. The result is that nothing is disprovable. Change a parameter and you change the outcome. Everything depends on the assumptions you make. So all the outcomes  (we freeze, we roast) are just the mathematical result of what you assumed in the first place.

 So what is the problem, you ask? The problem is that scientists and engineers forget that they are dealing with “models”: stuff that comes straight out of their minds. It is like they preferred watching the weather channel, say, to looking out the window and recording rainfall and wind by actual measures.

 The cumulative effect of this bad habit may have had drastic consequences in Brisbane with the recent floods. See why at:

 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/operator-of-dam-invented-rain-data/story-e6frg6nf-1226028379093

“The claim by SEQWater in its official report that a “one-in-2000-year” rainfall event occurred over the Wivenhoe Dam at a critical stage on January 11 has been widely reported in the media and cited by senior public servants to justify the near loss of control of the dam at the time.

“But no such rainfall event was measured by any rainfall gauges. Instead, the claim was manufactured by SEQWater after it modelled the rapid rise of levels in the dam, repositioned rainfall data to an area immediately upstream of the dam, and then doubled it.

“After extrapolating in this unusual way to achieve an extreme number, the SEQWater report states: “Rainfall of this intensity and duration over the Wivenhoe Dam lake area at such a critical stage of a flood event was unprecedented.”….

“Mr O’Brien, who has mounted a strong case that the devastating floods in and near Brisbane would have been almost completely avoided with better management of the dam, said the one-in-2000-year event was an “invention” that could not be taken seriously.

“He said: “To get the inflow rate, SEQWater had to manufacture an unmetered rainfall event over the dam, which was twice the size of any of the metered rainfall events, and this becomes a rainfall event with a one in 2000.”

“A panel of hydrologists and engineers has categorised the Brisbane River flood as a “dam-release flood”, meaning it was largely the result of massive releases. Official SEQWater data has highlighted concerns the operator held too much water for too long in the dam over a few critical days before the flood, then released extremely large volumes.”

Grey Goose sends me the following from the left coast: