Barrel Strength

Lawrence Solomon cites,

“The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider.  The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.”

“Climate science” has become one of those words you cannot hear without airquotes. Like “Study shows”.

The volcanic ash cloud that stopped airtraffic for several days was less than one twentieth the level that would have caused damage to aircraft engines, report’s The Daily Mail.  Junk science in the service of alarmists. Where have we heard this before?

The airplane that could have accurately determined what the level of ash was, was in the shop for a paint job. So they turned to computer models, you know, the kind that determine whether the planet is warming.

“The National Air Traffic Control Service decision to ban flights was based on Met Office computer models which painted a picture of a cloud of ash being blown south from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1268794/Remember-ash-cloud-It-didnt-exist-says-new-evidence.html#ixzz0mDh8Ijzu

When the Climategate scandal erupted, do you recall that Google listed far fewer references to it than did Bing and other search engines?

The attached interview with Dan Reicher, chief of energy plans for Google, and a former Assistant Secretary for Energy in the US government, explains why.

“Turns out, the answer is technology. Reicher — a former Department of Energy assistant secretary who now directs Google’s investments in clean energy — believes that exposing the hidden costs of dirty fuels will set off a rush of investment in new energy innovations. He says carbon pricing is an “essential signal we have to get to.” Right now, “money is sitting there to make significant investments,” he says, but the cash flow is sidelined because the incentives aren’t there.”

Let us deconstruct carbon pricing. According to Google it is “the true price of carbon combustion.”

What is the true price? Clearly it is not the price you currenly pay. On the contrary, it is the price you would pay if Google and its minions manage to add all the taxes they think you should pay to deal with the effect of using fuels. Guess what they are? Taxes for global warming caused by using carbon-based fuels.

What global warming?

“As Reicher puts it, “putting a serious price of carbon will both get us closer to the serious energy reductions we need to make but also accelerate the domestic development and adoption of these technologies.” It’s that last part that’s good for business. When government holds up its side of the “triangle of technology, policy, and finance” that Reicher says is essential for green development, it spurs the private investment and innovation that keeps businesses strong.

That’s where Congress comes in. The most important policy is carbon pricing. That’s what will change the economic fundamentals, augmented by other programs — like energy efficiency standards and government revolving loans to bring new ideas to the market. The technology and finance sides are ready and able; but we’ve been waiting for too long for the policy piece that can complete the puzzle.

Google hopes the Senate will act quickly to jumpstart what it thinks will be an economic bright spot in the current downturn. Reicher doesn’t really care how it’s done, saying there are “various ways to get to a carbon price.” Whatever packaging it comes in, a price on carbon will ultimately be good for that company and many others.

British Information Commissioner forces the hand-over of tree-ring data to “arch-skeptic”, and part time climate analyst, Doug Keenan. Professor Mike Baillie claims the decision is a “staggering injustice”.

The article concludes:

Keenan, who admits he has no expertise in tree-ring analysis, says that whatever the data may or may not reveal, the university has no right to keep the data secret. The deputy information commissioner agrees.

The finding, combined with Smith’s earlier strictures against the University of East Anglia, could have widespread repercussions for academic research. Baillie calls the ruling “a direct, and unpleasant, off-shoot of the information revolution. It now appears that research data can be demanded, and indeed obtained, by anyone.”

Keenan, meanwhile, has upped the ante. Following the ruling, he this week asked the university to supply emails between Baillie and the head of the university’s centre for climate, environment and chronology, Paula Reimer over the past three years. He told the Guardian they could reveal a conspiracy to prevent him getting Baillie’s data. “The university has obviously not understood how things changed in the wake of climategate,” he said. “They still think they can act with impunity.”

Why do we live in Canada? Canada is Huron for “post-glacial scrape”. It is cold three-quarters of the time. If your woodpile is gone by the end of March, you still have all of April and a good deal of May left in which to heat your house. Yes I know that the thaw begins in earnest most years in early April. This year it began in mid-March. Whoopee-doo! It is so close to an ice age here,  every month of the year except June, July, August, and September, and even in September you have the stove on some nights to keep the cabin warm.

I sat outside tonight smoking a cigar, which I recommend as a contemplative activity, seated on my deck, in the lee of my cabin.  I watched pine trees sway 15 degrees off-centre in a relentless ongoing blast of cold wind. The temperature, which had attained a freakish 30 degrees centigrade last weekend,  seven days ago (not seen since 1966), was officially 8 degrees tonight. I sat outside in a thick sweater, a windbreaker over it, with a toque (wool hat to Yanks) and gloves, wondering how any creature could live tonight. Every bird must be huddled in the woods, and any mammal must be in a burrow or a barn.

I once hear a Sudanese taxi driver describe what it was like to go home. Everyone slept outdoors on cots in the hot season (11 months of the year, I suppose), so that everyone was rather like in summer camp: the night was filled with the sound of people chatting amiably into the late hours. The night was a social and hospitable time.  Nor does the house in a hot climate  function  as it does in Canada. Here, one’s house is a heat conservation device. There, one’s house is a place to store property, or fend of an attack.  The kitchen is separated so that the house does not absorb the heat of cooking. Too hot inside? Take your bed out into the starry night, where everyone else is out on their cots  talking in low voices.

As the wind blasted outside tonight, I thought of the Dominican Republic, where we were a month ago.  There, you stick a cut wooden pole into the ground, and half the time it sprouts roots and turns into a tree.  And our trees! The weather invited them to sprout leaves last week, as if this place were the Dominican Republic. But the trees were too wise. They are programmed not to be deceived by warmth coming too early on the season, possibly because they work according to the warmth of the earth, not the sun.

And colour! Here every colour is found on a camouflage suit: grey-brown, grey, dark green, reddish-brown, and maybe black.  The northern eye longs for the yellows, blues, oranges and reds of flowers, and gets them for four months a year.

It seems I am always cutting wood, splitting, stacking and drying it for two years, so that when it meets its destiny in a cast-iron stove , it will burn well. So that, when I come in from the cold, I feel the palpable warmth of the cabin, and know that, though I live in an oven for three-quarters of the year, it is a safe place, where we can comfortably endure the dreadful climate we live in. Where the glass of wine is on the table, and great music on the horn.

I know this is no more than the adapted northen mind speaking, but life in the Canadian house-oven is quite comfortable. It has to be so. Everyplace else in post-glacial scrape is miserable. If you don’t believe me, just stand outside tonight in the wind.

The scientist who proposed the Gaia theory of the planet as a single organism is unimpressed by the goals of  “climate change” activists, according to an interview with the BBC. Professor James Lovelock is especially critical of the scientists and politicians who claim current climate models can reliably predict future conditions.

Click here for a page with video clips; full audio can be accessed here.

Unfortunately, this article is probably a plant. But it will make you laugh.

http://www.thefoxnation.com/global-warming/2010/03/29/global-warming-activist-freezes-death-antarctica

Global Warming Activist Freezes to Death in Antarctica
Famed global warming activist James Schneider and a journalist friend were both found frozen to death on Saturday, about 90 miles from South Pole Station, by the pilot of a ski plane practicing emergency evacuation procedures.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing”, recounted the pilot, Jimmy Dolittle. “There were two snowmobiles with cargo sleds, a tent, and a bright orange rope that had been laid out on the ice, forming the words, ‘HELP-COLD’.”
 
One friend of Prof. Schneider told ecoEnquirer that he had been planning a trip to an ice sheet to film the devastation brought on by global warming. His wife, Linda, said that she had heard him discussing the trip with his environmental activist friends, but she assumed that he was talking about the Greenland ice sheet, a much smaller ice sheet than Antarctica.

See the Baptist interpretation.

See also ironic interpretation.

For a fuller report of the original article, see this.

Readers of this blog will be au courant with the ongoing collapse of the man-caused global warming fraud. A new book is out by Andrew Montford called The Hockey Stick Illusion. It reviews the work of Stephen McIntyre of Toronto in bringing down the credibility of the “hockey stick graph” that showed the rise of temperature in the 20th century. It has won a favourable review from the British science writer Matt Ridley.

Al Gore wrote an op-ed in the New York Times this past weekend, in the same tone as Geoffrey Sachs’ latest in the Guardian. Nothing is wrong with the AGW craze, some little mistakes were made, the scientific consensus is overwhelming, floods, droughts, snowfall, species extinctions, alarums, dismay, send money. You know the drill. Former chief nerd at the Hadley CRU Phil Jones admits there has been no appreciable warming for past 15 years, but Gore’s buddies over at NASA find we have lived through the hottest decade since records have been kept. Oh and thnks to Gavin Schmidt and all the unindicted co-consprators over at NASA who have based their findings on reducing weather stations to low-lying and more urban locations.

Gore’s lyrical hymn to his wisdom can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html?ref=opinion

Full of gnostic hyperbole:

“From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.”

Is there no end to his megalomania? Apparently not.

This story doesn’t need commentary.

A seven-month-old girl survived for three days alone with a bullet in her chest after being shot by her parents as part of a suicide pact over their fears about global warming…

Her parents said they feared the effects of global warming in a suicide note discovered by police.

Update: UK Daily Mail provided the following additional details.

Their son Francisco, two, died instantly after being hit in the back.

But their unnamed daughter cheated death after the bullet from her dad’s handgun missed her vital organs.

Paramedics rushed her to hospital covered in blood when police alerted by worried neighbours discovered the massacre three days later.

The youngster is recovering in hospital in the town of Goya in the northern Argentine province of Corrientes, where doctors say she is out of danger.

It appears that a prominent Tory politician, Maxime Bernier,  has made the mistake of telling truth in a public place:  caution should be exercised in relation to the global warming scare because the science is faulty. Whenever a politician tells the plain truth in public, and that truth has become subject to a politically correct untruth, which in this environment always trumps it, the act is called a “gaffe”. Hence the discomfiture with M. Bernier. Everyone knows he is right except the Liberals and the Canadian media.

A Liberal activist treats this as the wonderful wedge issue that will separate Tories from the Canadian mainstream. Robert Silver is an energy consultant seeking to develop clean energy for Ontario.

“As a Liberal I obviously think this is a wonderful idea. I have a funny feeling Stephen Harper will think otherwise. He may have a real internal problem on his hands and I would expect this wedge to be exploited mercilessly in the months to come.”

I think this is one of those situations where, once again, it is the Tories who are reading it better than the Liberals. With whom will this issue resonate?

A more substantial and worthwhile discussion ensues at Watt’s Up With That. A debate is taking place between Judith Curry and Willis Eschenbach on the question of trust in science, which is really what is at stake here. Eschenbach insists the issue is not one of communication: the issue is, as he reports tongue in cheek, 73.1% of peer reviewed papers are junk science. Communicating junk better is not the solution.

One thing that your correspondent derives a great deal a pleasure from is reading leftist European newspapers, like the British Guardian.  They are very well written, thoughtful, well argued, albeit dead wrong.  The same cannot be said about the US leftist paper, such as NYT, which rely on deception and lies of omission to make their point.  The reason is obvious.  The US is a centre-right nation and Europe is centre-left.

One area where this has become painfully obvious is the coverage of Climategate.  The European leftist newspapers have been much more “forceful” in their coverage and US leftist newspapers have hardly noticed the kerfuffle.  This article provides a good overview of this disparity.  The European leftist realise that AGW is dead, while the naive US leftist, exemplified by NYT, dream on.

First, Geoffrey Sachs. Then me, in five carefully worded megatons.

Geoffrey Sachs in the Guardian:

We are witnessing a predictable process by ideologues and right-wing think tanks and publications to discredit the scientific process. Their arguments have been repeatedly disproved for 30 years — time after time — but their aggressive methods of public propaganda succeed in causing delay and confusion.

Climate change science is a wondrous intellectual activity. Great scientific minds have learned over the course of many decades to “read” the Earth’s history, in order to understand how the climate system works. They have deployed brilliant physics, biology, and instrumentation (such as satellites reading detailed features of the Earth’s systems) in order to advance our understanding.

And the message is clear: large-scale use of oil, coal, and gas is threatening the biology and chemistry of the planet. We are fuelling dangerous changes in Earth’s climate and ocean chemistry, giving rise to extreme storms, droughts, and other hazards that will damage the food supply and the quality of life of the planet.

 On the motives of those who oppose the global warming agenda:

“the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.”.

Finally, it is our duty to obey:

“The IPCC and the climate scientists are telling us a crucial message. We need urgently to transform our energy, transport, food, industrial, and construction systems to reduce the dangerous human impact on the climate. It is our responsibility to listen, to understand the message, and then to act.”

So let us review his argument:

• Those who oppose us are against the scientific method itself, it is not a mere disagreement about some facts.
• Our side is filled with wonderfully intelligent minds.
• Their side is corrupt and evil.
• Obey or be damned.

And now I am going to  give some of it back.

[After the passage of a few days since first reading the Sachs article, I realize what drove me and Antony Watts up the wall about it. It was not intended to rationally persuade anyone who differs in the least from its views. It was the equivalent of an officer slapping a dazed private, saying "get back in line, soldier. Nothing has happened". The entire eastern front has collapsed. The shattered wreck of armies is drifting past the position, and the officer is merely trying to cow the soldier back into line. It was an assertion of authority over weak minds, and the insult lies in the author's belief that we are weak minded. But he was not talking to us. He was talking to the wavering fanatics.]

First, this line of attack is entirely typical of all global warming alarmists whom I have encountered personally and in print, without exception. I have not met any global warmist who has failed to use his adherence to the dcctrine as a signal of his moral superiority, rather than as a position in a rational discussion. The most disturbing thing about warmists is their religious enthusiasm and intolerance.

Second,  I have observed this form of argument many times before.  I have argued with Jews, of whom Geoffrey Sachs is one, for over forty years on all matters political, theological, factual or legal. Many Jews, if not most, exhibit a strong tendency to overstate the argument in the terms used by Sachs. We shall discuss what those features are below.

Third, the global warming movement shows many of the features associated with ideological movements of the twentieth century: Feudianism, Boasian sociology, and subsequent intellectual movements making  left-wing critiques of society (the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer, Marcuse et al). These were mostly Jewish in origin, composition, and working styles. These groups exhibited or exhibit:

• high degrees of authoritarianism: intellectual subordination of the group to a charismatic leader or his ideas;
• sharp in-group out-group distinctions, between the elect/the saved/the initated and the rest, who are divided into the possibly useful and the damned (those who knowingly disagree).
• a conspiratorial style: worldly success in ensuring members of the in-group are placed in the right spots to manage the propagation of the group’s ideas and the upward mobility of its members;
• Condescension towards and failure to respect the ideas of others. Indeed, failure to agree is a sign of psychopathoogy.

To summarize:

1. The pattern of thought and behaviour of the global warming alarmists exhibits many resemblances to the intellectual fads of the 20th century.
2. The style of argument of Geoffrey Sachs is particularly Jewish.
3. People should not be cowed by Sachs’  style of discourse, particularly they should not be afraid of being called anti-semitic for saying that this style of argument is obnoxious, authoritarian, and anti-liberal.

Freud, Boas , Marcuse and their doctrines  have turned into the equivalent of a pet rocks.  Global warming via CO2 emissions is rapidly joining these intellectual poseurs on the rubbish dump of failed ideas.

The style of argument, the conspiratorial methods, the inability to withstand criticism from members of an out-group: all this will persist. It will simply find a new authoritarian ideology to latch onto.

So Geoffrey Sachs can go fuck himself.

Settled science indeed. Phil Jones qualifies, recants, and suddenly has reason to mention the medieval warm period.

Oh, and he may simply have lost the papers containing the data underlying claims of anthropogenic global warming. Messy professor’s office, you know. Remember, trillions of income transfer were riding on this.

To quote Glendronach, “the global warmists are retreating so fast they are red-shifting.”

I ought to have seen Joanne Nova’s Climate Money before now. If you haven’t, you too can cite it in the unlikely  event of being invited to Geoffrey Simpson’s for dinner. In short, government billions for AGW; millions somewhere for skeptics.

James Delingpole, that right-wing vicious attack dog – God I love him – has come out with something similar.