By Dalwhinnie
Conducted by Bruce Bawer, author of “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within“:
http://www.rights.no/publisher/publisher.asp?id=59&tekstid=3259
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By Dalwhinnie
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.”
By Arran Gold
Foreign Policy blog informs us of this.
Despite having served for years as a distinguished Pakistani diplomat, Akbar Zeb reportedly cannot receive accreditation as Pakistan’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The reason, apparently, has nothing to do with his credentials, and everything to do with his name — which, in Arabic, translates to “biggest dick”:
In Saudi Arabia, size does count.
A high level Pakistani diplomat has been rejected as Ambassador of Saudi Arabia because his name, Akbar Zib, equates to “Biggest Dick” in Arabic. Saudi officials, apparently overwhelmed by the idea of the name, put their foot down and gave the idea of his being posted there, the kibosh.
According to this Arabic-language article in the Arab Times, Pakistan had previously floated Zeb’s name as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, only to have him rejected for the same reason. One can only assume that submitting Zeb’s name to a number of Arabic-speaking countries is some unique form of punishment designed by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry — or the result of a particularly egregious cockup.
Addendum
by Glendronach
Always look back to history for guidance, even in this matter:
By Dalwhinnie
Changed conceptions are as real as changing the direction of your search beam. They have the same effect, of illuminating what was previously not seen.
Take, as an example, the increasing flood of findings which have shown shown that the AGW scare was false. Moreover, I suspect that journalists, finally awakend from their doctrinal slumbers, will show how it was a concocted, long term, well-funded international campaign of thought-control, with specific intentions to empower new ruling classes to govern the capitalist economies on the basis, for want of a better word, of a Gaian religion.
All from a change in perspective.
Today’s sermon arises from the sudden flood of damaging information on the fundamentals of AGW – man-caused global warming. The whole thing is going up in smoke before our eyes, for those who have eyes to see. Go to Climate Depot for the evidence of what I mean.
The story is as big as the fall of the Berlin Wall. It prefigures the complete collapse of the scam behind it.
This is not an inquiry into how it happened, nor is it intended to lay any more blame than I have already. The sudden revelations of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit emails showed to anyone who could read that the data was faked, the science was as cooked as your grade 12 science lab results, and worse, that a crew of enthusiasts has decided to blacklist those who did not breathe the same fumes. All true. But not what I am getting at.
It was Einstein who said “theory determines what is observed.” He meant that, until you can conceive of light being bent in a gravity field, you will not search for it. You will not assemble the instruments, go fo the funding, make a fool of yourself, if necessary, to disprove or prove a proposition that has not yet been framed.
As soon as the theory is properly framed, it can be tested.
The theory now being tested is that AGW is a scam, and suddenly vast amounts of false science are being exposed.
The ordinary skepticism which journalists apply to statements of politicians regarding their noble motives is being applied to internationally important dignitaries preaching AGW. The miracle is that it took 15 years for them to begin asking skeptical questions.
But I am not asking you to notice the effect of the change of focus; I am asking you to notice the change of focus itself. I can think of no better demonstration of the power of our minds to change “facts”. The change starts in the mind and goes outward into the world.
So if you tell me that there is nothing in the universe but matter and its vibrations, I ask you to think, how do these vibrations of matter cause such huge change of perspective? Would not an upward evaluation of matter be appropriate if it were seen capable of such magical transformations? And if there is a second distinct substance in the universe, of which mind is the foremost example, would you be able to find a better demonstration of the power of mind to shape events, than the difference in the AGW juggernaut between last September, when it could not be stopped, and now, when it is broken and burning?
Moral: If you do not like your life, change your theory.
By Dalwhinnie
Fanaticism is shouted out by Cabinet ministers and policy choices continue to be made for purely political reasons, despite the collapsing “science” of man-caused global warming. The zombie stumbles on.
Britain’s Climate Change Minister, Ed Miliband, declares war on climate change skeptics.
“Mistakes and attempts to hide contradictory data had to be seen in the light of the thousands of pages of evidence in the IPCC’s four-volume report in 2007, said Miliband. The most recent accusation about the panel’s work is that its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, may have known before the Copenhagen summit that its assessment report had seriously exaggerated the rate of melting of the Himalayan glaciers.
“However, Miliband was adamant that the IPCC was on the right track. “It’s worth saying that no doubt when the next report comes out it will suggest there have been areas where things have been happening more dramatically than the 2007 report implied,” he said.”
“The danger of climate scepticism was that it would undermine public support for unpopular decisions needed to curb carbon emissions, including the likelihood of higher energy bills for households, and issues such as the visual impact of wind turbines, said Miliband, who is also energy secretary.
Yep, I guess it would.
Worse, in a way, is Canada’s Jim Prentice saying Canada will reduce its CO2 emissions by 17%.
”Canada has formally notified the United Nations that it has embraced the Copenhagen Accord and will cut its carbon emissions by 17 per cent by 2020 from 2005 levels.
Federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice says it was the federal government’s plan all along to align its position with that of the United States.
Prentice has said that the first step towards a binding international treaty on climate change is for countries to outline their own emission-reduction targets before the UN’s official deadline of Jan. 31.
He says that although reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent will be challenging, he believes it is attainable.”
In the case of Prentice, does he believe a word he is saying? Or is he just talking for the microphones?
By Dalwhinnie
Forget prorogation, which is a temporary blip in the microcosm of Canadian politics. Remember Copenhagen. Do you? Do you know how big a victory we won?
The scale and speed of the collapse of the AGW scare ought to inspire us with trust that truth will prevail. It is doing so before our eyes.
The rats are leaving the ship. Andrew Weaver, one of Canada’s leading scientific bedwetters on the subject, has declared the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, tainted
“Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria, says the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has allowed it to advocate for action on global warming, rather than serve simply as a neutral science advisory body.
”There’s been some dangerous crossing of that line,” said Weaver on Tuesday, echoing the published sentiments of other top climate scientists in the U.S. and Europe this week.
”Some might argue we need a change in some of the upper leadership of the IPCC, who are perceived as becoming advocates,” he told Canwest News Service. “I think that is a very legitimate question.”
To those more familiar with the story, Andrew Weaver has been foremost among those who have crossed the line into advocacy. But let that rest.
“Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have “cherry picked” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea — which has a warming effect on winter weather.”
Some stories play out over decades. Global warming is one of them. Considering the amount of government funding which sustains it, it has proven remarkably fragile in the face of the email leaks of climategate. Considering also the massive buy-in of the MSM and ordinary people to its simple tale of global sin through CO2 emissions and global redemption through carbon offsets, it is amazing how quickly intelligent people do not discuss it anymore.
If you are still skeptical as to whether sanity has prevailed, then read this: and this: The bedwetters are declaring it a disatrous year for global warming “science”.
Remember: whether the earth is warming or cooling is a matter of science; what we might need to do about that is a matter of policy, if we can affect the outcome at all. There is plentiful evidence that we are not causing, and cannot cause, much of an impact through CO2 emissions. There is absolute proof that we can cause environmental catastrophes without blinking an eye: deforestation, overfishing, overgrazing, and so forth. So while truth has prevailed against lies, hubris and folly, on this major issue, the latter three have plenty more force in them yet, and always will.
By Dalwhinnie
More money for the rich, through invisble taxation.
Christopher Booker is a fierce opponent of the whole scheme.
“This is the new global industry based on buying and selling the right to emit CO2, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year, which through schemes such as the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism and the EU’s Emissions Trading System is making a small minority of people, including Al Gore, extremely rich.
“The only really concrete achievement of Copenhagen was to win agreement to the perpetuating of those Kyoto rules that have created this vast industry, which has two main beneficiaries. On one hand are that small number of people in China and India who have learnt how to work this system to their huge advantage. On the other are all those Western entrepreneurs who have piled into what has become the fastest‑growing commodity market in the world.
“The part played at Copenhagen by all the tree-huggers, abetted by the BBC and their media allies, was to keep hysteria over warming at fever pitch while the politicians haggled over the real prize, to keep the Kyoto system in place.”
By Dalwhinnie
As the science behind global warming evaporates, it becomes necessary to increase the vilification of opposition, while changing the subject. Pull back from any concrete assertions of fact, and sling shit at your opponents from the high ground of self-declared moral superiority.
George Mobiot’s vapourings in this week’s Groniad are a case in point. Observe how he eliminates any middle ground:
“‘Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impedimentsand those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.”
Notice two distortions by which Monbiot frames the debate. First, those who oppose are inherently unreasonable: Read the rest…
By Dalwhinnie
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.
By Dalwhinnie
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.
“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!
By Dalwhinnie
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.
By Dalwhinnie
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…
By Dalwhinnie
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.
By Dalwhinnie
From the November 13th, 2009 The Economist
Geoffrey Miller wrote:
“The trouble is, the resequencing data will reveal much more about human evolutionary history and ethnic differences than they will about disease genes.”
“We will also identify the many genes that create physical and mental differences across populations, and we will be able to estimate when those genes arose. Some of those differences probably occurred very recently, within recorded history. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argued in “The 10,000 Year Explosion” that some human groups experienced a vastly accelerated rate of evolutionary change within the past few thousand years, benefiting from the new genetic diversity created within far larger populations, and in response to the new survival, social and reproductive challenges of agriculture, cities, divisions of labour and social classes. Others did not experience these changes until the past few hundred years when they were subject to contact, colonisation and, all too often, extermination.
“If the shift from GWAS to sequencing studies finds evidence of such politically awkward and morally perplexing facts, we can expect the usual range of ideological reactions, including nationalistic retro-racism from conservatives and outraged denial from blank-slate liberals. The few who really understand the genetics will gain a more enlightened, live-and-let-live recognition of the biodiversity within our extraordinary species—including a clearer view of likely comparative advantages between the world’s different economies.”
The news will be as devastating for blank-slaters as it has been for warmists.
Take heart, brethren. Sauron’s Empire is falling down. The Internet is the melting of Sauron’s One Ring. More falsity will be exposed as rubbish in the next twenty years than the Left has been able to generate in the last hundred.
By Dalwhinnie
In case anyone thinks we skeptics tend to exaggerate the extent to which the AGW crowd has gone completely over the top into a frenzy of self righteousness and exaggeration, please go to http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/, which is produced by Bill St. Arnaud, chief technologist for Canada’s backbone university computing network.
Amidst many interesting and possibly quite useful notions for making energy consumption more efficient – no objections here – we find the two excerpts below and the absence of any mention, however disdaining, of climategate.
Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists – Climate Change, Environment -
The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. …
Note the date, relative to the East Anglia CRU hack. Also of interest, in the article cited in part above, the authors of the alrmist report were a group of scientists called the Global Carbon Project study:
“The Global Carbon Project study, led by Professor Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, which found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available.”
uh-huh. Why are we not surprised? and further….
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-chase/fossil-fuel-is-the-new-sl_b_310007.html
Fossil Fuel Is the New Slavery: Morally and Economically Corrupt
A century and a half ago, fossil fuels replaced slaves as the underpriced energy source driving American economic growth. And like slavery, our deep economic dependence makes change difficult, despite the incontrovertible reality that our fossil-fueled system is profoundly wrong. America could not thrive while captured by the slave economy, nor can she thrive while in thrall to a carbon-based economy.
It required almost a hundred years and a devastating civil war to rid the US of slavery. Business interests fought to retain the morally and economically corrupt status quo. Favorable economics prompted blindness and slow response to the moral imperative for ending slavery. Favorable economics today cloud the minds of many legislators and business interests to cling to our system of underpriced fossil fuels. Despite the best efforts of Congressmen Waxman and Markey, the climate bill out of Congress proposed 2020 goals of only 17 percent reductions in CO2 over 2005 levels and passed by the narrowest of margins. Science tells us our 2020 goals need to 25 to 40% reductions over 1990 levels. Senators Boxer and Kerry have proposed 20%, a step in the right direction.
Ownership of another human being and reaping the benefit of their labor is repugnant. While burning fossil fuels is not as intimately observable or viscerally felt, a direct link from our actions to real individual suffering can be traced. [snip]
And there will be more casualties. The best estimates of the slave trade’s death toll are 15 to 20 million people over its 400-year history. Failure to move to a new low-carbon energy source will result in a similar magnitude of unforgivable suffering and death. The World Health Organization says that climate change was responsible for 300,000 deaths this last year, predicting as many as 9 million excess deaths over the next 20 years alone. Almost all of these initial victims will be among Africa and Asia’s poorest who have no voice and no vote with regard to what happens in the US Congress. [snip]
Delaying real change is intolerable. Unlike slavery, the global warming legacy will be forever irreparable and unrecoverable. New predictions indicate a good chance of a nine degree global temperature increase this century. What we eat, where we live, how we live, and indeed who lives will be changed. Forever. Again, we face an undeniable moral imperative.”
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So it is nine degrees in this article up from six in the previous one.
And if I burn the logs I cut in my woodstove, is this the moral equivalent of slavery. or merely feudalism?