Why the BBC needs pushing off the taxpayers teat

Today, MP’s vote on whether it should cease to be a criminal offence to buy and watch a TV without paying a hefty fee for the production their propaganda, whether or not you choose to watch it. Nearly 10% of all court cases in the UK are for non-payment of this extortionate impost. Which of course is another burden on the taxpayer, who has to cover the cost of this TV tax enforcement. Most non-payers are people who don’t have enough money to cover all their costs and are claiming benefits. They need legal aid to fight their case. Triple whammy for everyone else.

If the BBC was a high quality broadcaster, we might be prepared to continue putting up with all this expense. But a string of scandals has so damaged its reputation and output that it has blown its credibility. The public has had enough of its antics, sins, omission, and bias. I won’t rehearse the list here, everybody knows. However there is one issue which has been successfully hidden by the BBC which deserves another mention. 28gate.

S. S. Vasiliev and V. A. Dergachev: 2400-year cycle in atmospheric radiocarbon concentration

Here we have  two fine scientists who have written an excellent and easily readable paper, well supported by the evidence they cite.

2400-year cycle in atmospheric radiocarbon concentration: bispectrum of 14C data over the last 8000 years
S. S. Vasiliev and V. A. Dergachev

Received: 5 September 2000 – Revised: 6 August 2001 – Accepted: 21 August 2001

Claim: Evidence of missing heat hiding in deep oceans is now hiding in deep forests

From the ‘you couldn’t make this sh1t up… oh, they did’ dept. via Reuters:

Sea level rise has been one of the clearest signs of climate change – water expands as it warms and parts of Greenland and Antarctica are thawing, along with glaciers from the Himalayas to the Alps.

But in a puzzle to climate scientists, the rate slowed to 2.4 millimeters (0.09 inch) a year from 2003 to 2011 from 3.4 mm from 1994-2002, heartening skeptics who doubt that deep cuts are needed in mankind’s rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change on Sunday, experts said the rate from 2003-2011 would have been 3.3 mm a year when excluding natural shifts led by an unusually high number of La Nina weather events that cool the surface of the Pacific Ocean and cause more rain over land.

“There is no slowing in the rate of sea level rise” after accounting for the natural variations, lead author Anny Cazenave of the Laboratory for Studies in Geophysics and Spatial Oceanography in Toulouse, France, told Reuters.

In La Nina years, more rain fell away from oceans, including over the Amazon, the Congo basin and Australia, she said. It is unclear if climate change itself affects the frequency of La Ninas.

Rainfall over land only temporarily brakes sea level rise.

“Eventually water that falls as rain on land comes back into the sea,” said Anders Levermann, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who was not involved in the study. “Some of it goes into ground water but most of it will drain into rivers, or evaporate.”

HIATUS IN WARMING

The apparent slowing of sea level rise coincided with what the U.N. panel of climate experts calls a hiatus in global warming at the Earth’s surface, when temperatures have risen less sharply despite record emissions of greenhouse gases.

“The slowdown in sea level rise … is due to natural variability in the climate and is not indicative of a slowdown in the effects of global warming,” Nature Climate Change said.

Many scientists suspect that the “missing heat” from a build-up greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is going into the deep oceans as part of natural variations in the climate.

But, because water expands as it warms, that theory had been hard to reconcile with the apparent slowdown in sea level rise.

Read the full story

HS2: Duffers Heading for the Buffers

 

Want to know where we landed on the Moon? This cool vintage NASA map shows you:

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Here’s a useful Map for our studies on the Lunar surface temperature. Thanks LitD!

Lights in the Dark

Map circa 1972 showing the Apollo landing sites (NASA)

Apollos 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 all successfully delivered men to the Moon between the summer of ’69 and December 1972, but do you know where on the lunar surface they each landed? This awesome vintage map from NASA points each site out (and is a great lunar atlas as well.)

With four of the six planned lunar missions completed, this chart has been prepared to show the various areas of the lunar “nearside” to be visited by astronauts representing the NASA Apollo program. Apollo’s 11, 12, 14 and 15 are shown at their respective landing points. Apollo 16 and Apollo 17, planned for later this year at Descartes and Taurus Littrow, respectively, also are depicted on the map.

The map was created in March 1972, prior to the launches of Apollo 16 and 17.

All I can think…

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Challenging Arrhenius Again

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Peter Morecambe AKA ‘Galloping Camel’ has replicated Tim Channon’s successful replication of Vavasada’s lunar equatorial average temperature result, using a different software package using similar principles. This is a positive result for citizen science, boldly going where co2 theorists fear to tread. How will they explain a surface temperature enhancement of 91 Celcius? Not with co2, that’s for sure.

Digging in the Clay

Posted on behalf of Peter Morcombe

Consensus climate scientists contend that the GHE (Greenhouse Effect) amounts to 33^oC.  My definition of the GHE is the change in the average temperature of a planetary body that can be attributed to its atmosphere.  In an earlier post the theories of respectable climate scientists such as Scott Denning were compared to the theories mavericks such as Nikolov & Zeller.

The two sides agree that Earth’s average temperature is ~288 Kelvin.  However they can’t agree about the temperature of an airless Earth, so one says the GHE is 33 Kelvin while the other says 134 Kelvin.   Both parties apply the same principles of physics so how can they arrive at such different answers?   The explanation lies in the assumptions that they made in an attempt to simplify their analysis.

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Bloggies 2014 finalists

A gentle reminder to our readers. There are still a few days left to vote  Voting ends tonight in this years Bloggies. We have been selected as finalists in the ‘Best European Weblog’ section. Thanks for your consideration.

Voting for the Bloggies 2014

• Saturday, March 1
  Finalists are announced and voting reopens to all to choose the winners.
• Sunday, March 23
  10:00 PM EDT (early Monday morning European time)
  Voting closes.
• Monday, March 31
  8:00 PM EDT
  Winners are announced and the Weblog of the Year receives a prize of 2,014 US cents (US$20.14).

Lets have a look focussing on blogs we know well, no offence meant to others.

Bloggies 2014 finalists (list at end of page there)

Weblog of the Year
*JoNova
*No Frakking Consensus
Quirky Chrissy
Travel Geek Magazine
The Modern Nomad
*Watts Up With That?

ENSO: What chance a 2014 El Nino?

Here’s the BOM’s sub surface monitor output for the Pacific ocean:

Here’s the WMO forecast:
Current Situation and Outlook
The tropical Pacific continues to be ENSO-neutral (neither El Niño nor La Niña). Model forecasts and expert opinion suggest that neutral conditions are likely to continue into the second quarter of 2014. Current model outlooks further suggest an enhanced possibility of the development of a weak El Niño around the middle of 2014, with approximately equal chances for neutral or weak El Niño. However, models tend to have reduced skill when forecasting through the March-May period. National Meteorological and Hydrological Services and other agencies will continue to monitor the conditions over the Pacific and assess the most likely state of the climate through the first half of 2014.

DIVINER emerges from the dark side

http://diviner.ucla.edu/

The Talkshop reported the DIVINER web site had gone AWOL, probes were dispatched, reports came back saying it was tired and darn well deserves a tea break, there you go, the penalty for a Brit on the team.

David Rose: BBC boss gags ‘sceptics’ from climate change debates

From GWPF’s summary of David Rose’s article in the Mail on Sunday:

A BBC executive in charge of editorial standards has ordered programme editors not to broadcast debates between climate scientists and global warming sceptics.

Alasdair MacLeod claimed that such discussions amount to ‘false balance’ and breach an undertaking to the Corporation’s watchdog, the BBC Trust.

Mr MacLeod, head of editorial standards and compliance for BBC Scotland, sent an email on  February 27 to 18 senior producers and editors, which has been obtained by The Mail on Sunday.

It reads:

When covering climate change stories, we should not run debates / discussions directly between scientists and sceptics. If a programme does run such a discussion, it will… be in breach of the editorial guidelines on impartiality.

Dr Tim Ball: The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science

Tim Ball has a new book out. ‘The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science’ is a hard hitting critique of the development of the co2 scare covering the whole sorry saga from the inception of the IPCC up to present. I’m reproducing the preface here with his permission in order to promote this great read to as wide an audience as possible. Tim is still in the throes of dealing with the moribund lawsuit Mickey Mann launched against him after he quipped that Mann should be in the state pen rather than at Penn State. Please consider buying his book in order to support his effort to defend himself against the  combined resourses of Mann and his financial backers.

The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science
by Dr Tim Ball – Stairway Press January 21, 2014

PREFACE

Then up and spent the evening walking with my wife, talking; and it thundering and lightening mightily all the evening—and this year have had the most thunder and lightening, they say, of any in man’s memory.

—Diary of Samuel Pepys, entry for July 3, 1664

I’ve  studied  climate  both scientifically and academically for over forty years after spending eight years studying meteorology and observing the weather as an aircrew and operations officer in the Canadian Air Force. When I began the academic portion of my career, global cooling was the concern, but it was not a major social theme. During the 1980s the concern switched to global warming which became a major political, social and economic issue.

I watched my chosen discipline—climatology—get hijacked and exploited in service of a political agenda, watched people who knew little or nothing enter the fray and watched scientists become involved for political or funding reasons—willing to corrupt the science, or, at least, ignore what was really going on. The tale is more than a sad story because it set climatology back thirty years and damaged the credibility of science in general.

P.A. Semi: Topology of the curved space-time universe

Our friend Semi has sent me a paper to  first publish here at the talkshop. There are some interesting puzzles and some speculative ideas in it which will intrigue our readers. Since as Hans Jelbring showed the other day, we tend to be sceptical of ‘grand theories’, we should also temper our scepticism  with an openness to alternative ideas lest it becomes a dour cynicism. The great thing about having an open mind is the ability to filter things out of it as well as allow things into it. So we can take the parts of someone else’s work we find interesting or useful, and leave the parts we aren’t interested in, without feeling the need to pass judgement on them.

Semi emailed this introduction along with the paper:

This winter I’ve sent you one my works, and said, there is another work pending, which I’m attaching now…
It is related to the Curvature Cosmology by David F. Crawford and original Einstein’s hyper-spherical universe, of which Albert E. was  incorrectly persuaded by his colleagues at that time, that it was incorrect. This idea of (hyper)spherical universe is as revolutionary, as once was the idea of a spherical Earth.

Tony Thomas: A rather one-sided conversation

Tony Thomas wrote this article a while back in February. I didn’t repost it at that time, but a recent post on ‘the Conversation’ drawn to my attention yesterday (H/T whoever it was – sorry I can’t remember), makes it apropos. The Conversation’s strap line is ‘Academic Rigour – Journalistic flair’. Even as the APS reconsiders IPCC science and it’s position statement on climate change, the publicly funded activists at the Conversation discuss how to ‘drown out’ ‘deniers’…

A rather one-sided conversation
Tony Thomas – 14-2-2014

Cory Zanoni “Quietly concerned about everything”

Staffed by left-leaning refugees from commercial news organisations’ withered operations, largely publicly funded and lavishly so, the online pulpit for academics to bang their favourite drums has little sympathy for those who doubt the planet is melting

The lavishly-funded leftist blog for academia, The Conversation, has hired a new manager specifically to make contributors converse more politely. Cory Zanoni, an RMIT psychology graduate and social media guru, got the job of Community Manager in January. He was hired after complaints last year about vulgar comments on the articles with the responsibility for  ‘creating a space for intelligent discussion’.

Friends of Science billboard, seems sensible

Photo credit: Ken Gregory Friends of Science 2014: Unrestricted use

Rather than hit people, tell them they are bad, a kinder approach, this apparently is a new Friends Of Science billboard. In the snow.

Is this good thinking or is the only way aggression?

Will it change any minds or is it affirmation?

Tony Thomas: Finally, Some Real Climate Science

Guest Post emailed to me  by Tony Thomas, originally published at Quadrant online:

Finally, Some Real Climate Science
Tony Thomas 18-3-2014

The American Physical Society has been amongst the loudest alarmist organisations whipping up hysteria about CO2, but a review of its position that has placed three sceptics on the six-member investigatory panel strongly suggests the tide has turned.

The 50,000-strong American body of physicists, the American Physical Society (APS), seems to be turning significantly sceptical on climate alarmism.

The same APS put out a formal statement in 2007 adding its voice to the alarmist hue and cry. That statement caused resignations of some of its top physicists (including 1973 Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giaever and Hal Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara).[1] The APS was forced by 2010 to add some humiliating clarifications but retained the original statement that the evidence for global warming was ‘incontrovertible’.[2]

By its statutes, the APS must review such policy statements each half-decade and that scheduled review is now under way, overseen by the APS President Malcolm Beasley.

The review, run by the society’s Panel on Public Affairs, includes four powerful shocks for the alarmist science establishment.[3]

Hans Jelbring: Big Bang – BICEP flexes it’s muscle

The press release from BICEP making claims regarding detection of gravitational waves which inform us about the origin of the cosmos has been doing the rounds of the world’s media organisations.  Hans Jelbring comments:

Big Bang – The greatest fairy tale ever told
Hans Jelbring – 18-3-2014

There is freedom of choosing religion in our country so there is no problem what you or I believe. On the other hand there is a problem when scientists mix facts supported by evidence and laws of nature with fantasy, unfounded hypotheses and faith.

There is no qualitative difference being a creationist believing that earth and our galaxy was created 6000 years ago or believing that the universe was created from a small cosmic egg 14 billion years ago. From where did this egg originate and what existed before that? There must have been something more (or rather, less) than a nuclear bomb within it since at that point not even matter are believed to has existed. None of these beliefs are or can be supported by scientific methods or verified experience. Hence, it cannot be classified as science.

Anthropogenic Global Warming propaganda faces new opposition in Wyoming legislature

From Arstechnica:

Over the past several years, a number of states have worked with organizations including the National Research Council, National Science Teachers Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science to develop new standards for teaching science in public schools. The result, termed the Next Generation Science Standards, provides states with a chance to update their science education goals to focus more on the scientific process. So far, nine states and the District of Columbia have adopted the standards.

But the process hasn’t always been smooth. In Kentucky, the Governor adopted them over the objections of state legislators. In Kansas, the adoption resulted in a lawsuit that sought to block their adoption. Now, in the latest wrinkle, the Wyoming legislature has preemptively blocked their use in that state.

Adrian Kerton: Has The UK Had Exceptional Winter Rainfall Or Is It Just Weather As Normal?

Guest post from Adrian Kerton:

The BBC Horizon programme on ‘Global Weirding’
Horizon say: “Something weird seems to be happening to our weather – it appears to be getting more extreme.

The BBC reports:
Dame Julia Slingo, Met Office Chief Scientist, said the variable UK climate meant there was “no definitive answer” to what caused the storms. “But all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change,” she added. “There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events.”

“We have records going back to 1766 and we have nothing like this,” she said. “We have seen some exceptional weather. We can’t say it is unprecedented but it is exceptional.”

So what constitutes exceptional weather?

Paul Homewood has analysed the figures extensively and those suggest that for the UK, the weather is doing pretty much what it has always done.

As a manufacturing engineer I was introduced to the wonderful world of control charts so I have constructed these to see if our current winter UK rainfall was exceptional.

Met Office advertising for new CEO, replacing Hirst.

Job Description
BIS intends to appoint a successor to the current Chief Executive of the Met Office, John Hirst, who has served with distinction for the past 7 years.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Met Office is the Accounting Officer for the agency. His task is to lead, direct, and manage the Met Office to ensure the successful delivery of the objectives set by the Minister of State for Business and Enterprise, who acts as the Ministerial “Owner” on behalf of the government as a whole.

.. etc.

Recruitment is being handled by Russel Reynolds Associates.

http://www.russellreynolds.com/content/chief-executive-met-office

A notable change but doesn’t really say anything.

On the other hand doing this now means that Cleggeroon might have an influence.

Caminito Del Rey – Restoration Begins

This is great news. I will be able to traverse the caminito again. Last time was pretty scary.

MalagaBay

Sur in English reports that work has begun to restore the Caminito del Rey walkway.

The Caminito del Rey runs at a height of 100 metres over the Guadalhorce river.
…
A team of highly specialised workers will have to be used, hanging from the rock to put the wood into place along the four kilometres of rock face, as well as the metal of the bridge.

Along some stretches, the floor will be made of glass panels to give a view of the gorge below.

The materials will be transported to the climbers by helicopter.

This is an unusual method of working, but the Caminito del Rey is a very unusual walkway.
…
“Today we are taking a definitive step towards the Caminito de Rey being used again,” said Elías Bendodo. “It will no longer be something which is prohibited and dangerous, and will become something that people can…

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