Merchants of spin: Naomi Oreskes just sent me an email

You have to laugh, there’s some serious conspiracy ideation going on here, and precious little science.:

From:	Professor Naomi Oreskes <xxx@xxxxxxxx.xxx>
To:	Roger Tattersall <xxx@xxxxxx.xxx>
Date:	14:10

Slugging the Kool-aid again Naomi?

Dear Roger,

When I wrote the book Merchants of Doubt in 2010, I only wanted one thing: to uncover the truth about who was behind the widespread, and sadly, effective, campaigns to undermine the established science of climate change, and why they were doing what they were doing.

I never imagined that, a few years later, Sony Pictures would release Merchants of Doubt, a captivating feature film that exposes the ugly world of climate denial like never before.

Global warming slowdown probably due to natural cycles, study finds

Sorry folks [image credit: wikia]

The Guardian newspaper finally facing up to climate reality? Well, after a fashion. Their global warming can may have been kicked down the road for a while, that’s all.

The idea that natural variation could make temperatures go up as well as down is still not for discussion in their biased climate world.

H/T Lord Beaverbrook.

Guardian report: Manmade global warming over the past decade has probably been partly offset by the cooling effect of natural variability in the Earth’s climate system, a team of climate researchers have concluded.

The finding could help explain the slowdown in temperature rises this century that climate sceptics have seized on as evidence climate change has stopped, even though 14 of the 15 hottest years on record have happened since 2000.

The authors of the new paper describe the slowdown, sometimes called a global warming hiatus or pause, as a “false pause”. They warn that the natural cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic that they found are currently having an overall cooling effect on temperatures will reverse in the coming decades – at which point warming will accelerate again.

John Brignell: How we know they know they are lying

H/T to tweeter ‘ILuvCO2′ for reminding me about this essay from the excellent ‘numberwatch’ website, written by its owner John Brignell back in 2009. Still fresh and relevant.

That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.
Tennyson – The Grandmother.

It is to some extent forgivable when people adopt extreme positions out of misapprehension or delusion. It is quite another matter if they mislead others by deliberate falsehood. Politicians, of course, treat the lie as part of their professional equipment. Indeed, in some circumstances they are obliged to use it (when, for example, telling the truth about the economy would cause a run on the currency). In science, up to recent times, there is no circumstance in which a deliberate falsehood is justifiable. It requires at a minimum being drummed out of one’s learned society.

All that has changed with the rise of authoritarian government. In Britain this took the form of nationalisation of the universities, begun under Thatcher and completed under Blair.  In the USA it took the form of new state-funded bureaucracies, such as the EPA, who maintained control by the monopoly of funding. The global warming religion changed everything.

Tony Thomas: Believe the climate hype or we drown the puppies

Guest post from Tony Thomas over at Quadrant Online:

You Couldn’t Make This Stuff Up

But then most of us aren’t “climate scientists”, who have once again granted themselves permission to assemble a cavalcade of conjecture and omission and parade it as “evidence”, courtesy of the Australian Academy of Science. They do, however, care deeply about puppies and kittens

The Australian Academy of Science  has hitched its wagon to the “climate change will kill kittens and puppies” school of science. This kittens-and-puppies theme was dreamed up by Harvard University’s Naomi Oreskes and endorsed by Academician and ABC Science Show host Robyn Williams — a device quite deliberately intended to make householders sit up, take notice and believe in the scariness of computer-model forecasts.

Guy Callendar: Data shows CO2 changes LAG BEHIND temperature changes

UPDATE: This post mistook the upper curve for CO2 in the figure 4 from Callendar’s paper, cropped by the Guy Callendar twitter account. It is actually 5yr smoothed temperature, as pointed out by commenter ‘berniel’ in comments. So the apparent ~2.5yr lag between the upper and lower curve is due to the smoothing of the temperature data. This doesn’t change the fact that CO2 lags temperature at all timescales, but does invalidate the analysis in this article.

Back in 1938, Guy Callendar wrote a paper “The artificial production of CO2 & its influence on temperature”. In it is a figure showing how they both rose in the early C20th. MET office PR man Richard Betts retweeted the Guy Callendar twitter account this morning.

My 1938 paper demonstrated that the Earth had warmed over the previous 50 years & that CO2 was partly responsible pic.twitter.com/AaDoA2oJLD

— Guy Callendar (@GuyCallendar) February 16, 2015

Unlike more modern misrepresentations given by climate scientists, which spuriously splice the instrumental record from 1950 onto ice core records (with a large temporal mismatch), Callendar uses actual empirical measurements of airborne CO2. His data reveals something sceptics have frequently pointed up: Temperature changes lead CO2 changes. Check my annotation to Callendar’s plot below the break.

Temperature adjustments: simmering science scandal ?

Weather station [image credit: Peter West/National Science Foundation]

Long-time critic of climate alarmism Christopher Booker has no doubt what the answer should be in his latest piece at the Telegraph:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

NASA: Being COY With OCO CO2 Data

Recntly, NASA released data from the OCO satellite borne instument measuring CO2 emissions across the globe. The December data with a map of the Earth’s rainforests in the image below clearly shows where most CO2 is being emitted.

But looking at NASA’s ‘Earth Now’ page for CO2, you wouldn’t recognise the true situation.

Oops! One wrong equation caused the #climate scare!

Reposted from the Climate Sceptic Party. H/T the Hockey Schtick

How did many usually sensible experts get “GLOBAL WARMING” so very wrong?

VERY SIMPLE…..

Oops! One wrong equation caused the climate scare!

RED FACES all around among the profiteers of doom. A wrong equation that falsely triples the tiny direct warming caused by doubling CO2 concentration has been discovered and exposed in a major peer-reviewed paper just published in the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences  (LINK – pdf), one of the world’s top peer review science journals.

No rogue equation means no climate crisis.

#BBCbias on Fracking: Shalegas in your water

The BBC doesn’t like fracking. This is evident from their coverage over the years (example). In order to ramp up concern, they use every trick in the book. This one is a diagram they use which is designed to worry people about shalegas getting into the water table, and the ongoing presence of a big ugly tower (wind turbines anyone?) making a blot on the lanscape. Of course, they include a ‘not to scale’ grey on a grey background label for plausible deniability purposes.

UPDATE: Josh has kindly send a ‘to scale’ drawing for us to refer too. BBC take note. See bottom of post.

Below the break, I’ve made an improved version which the BBC is welcome to make use of if they are interested in escaping further criticism of their blatant bias. I left them some tidying work to do, since I don’t get paid for correcting their deceptive output.

Fracking: MPs demanding ban ‘listened to ill-informed green groups not science’

Gas heating [image credit: CVO Fire]

A committee of MPs has been accused of listening to “ill-informed” green groups instead of scientific evidence, after it called for a ban on fracking for shale gas, citing health and environmental fears, the Daily Telegraph reports.

The Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) on Monday called for fracking to be put on hold indefinitely, and at a minimum banned in national parks, amid “huge uncertainties around the impact that fracking could have on water supplies, air quality and public health”.

Developing shale gas is also “incompatible” with the UK’s legally-binding climate change targets, it claimed.

Greenpeace names 20% of the Nazca desecraters

Businessweek has the story. The image below shows the damage (bordered with the red dashed line) Greenpeace did to the world heritage site which contains Peru’s national emblem, the Hummingbird.

Greenpeace has provided Peruvian authorities with the identities of the four foreign activists principally responsible for vandalizing the Nazca Lines heritage site during last month’s international climate negotiations in Lima, Bloomberg Businessweekhas learned.  The stunt, in which activists placed yellow letters urging climate action near a hummingbird carved in soil 1,500 years ago that is a national symbol of Peru, bombed. It distracted attention from the climate talks and outraged Peru’s people and government, which has called for the activists’ extradition to face legal charges. The action also gave Greenpeace, one of the world’s most recognized nongovernmental organizations and social brands, the worst public relations black eye in its 40-plus years of attention-grabbing protest.

Matt Ridley: A Lukewarmer Against Dogmatism

Reposted from Matt Ridley’s blog

I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue but I no longer think it is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future. That last year was the warmest yet, in some data sets, but only by a smidgen more than 2005, is precisely in line with such lukewarm thinking.

This view annoys some sceptics who think all climate change is natural or imaginary, but it is even more infuriating to most publicly funded scientists and politicians, who insist climate change is a big risk. My middle-of-the-road position is considered not just wrong, but disgraceful, shameful, verging on scandalous. I am subjected to torrents of online abuse for holding it, very little of it from sceptics.

I was even kept off the shortlist for a part-time, unpaid public-sector appointment in a field unrelated to climate because of having this view, or so the headhunter thought. In the climate debate, paying obeisance to climate scaremongering is about as mandatory for a public appointment, or public funding, as being a Protestant was in 18th-century England.

Tony Thomas: The Settled Science of Ignoring Facts

Guest post from Tony Thomas originally posted at Quadrant online.

Australia’s Academy of Science is overdue to clarify its position on global warming, but don’t expect that much-delayed document to be written in the ink of rational objectivity. Despite doubts creeping into the pronouncements of overseas counterparts, local warmists remain determined to defend the faith.

The position of the Australian Academy of Science on global warming was last stated in August, 2010. It basically regurgitated the 2007 findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with some Australian temperature trends thrown in – from 1910, thus eliding the inconvenient 19^thcentury heatwaves.

But the Academy has  had  problems with its promised update for 2014.   Kick-start funds for printing and production, undisclosed but modest, arrived from the Labor government in June, 2013.

By October, 2014, the text was finished  and the project moved to the design phase, in readiness for publication before the Lima climate fest, which started on December 1.  The booklet missed that bus and now the publication date has been put forward into 2015.  I gather that the delays reflect the usual problems of committee work, plus the illness of a key author.

Biased Bob: Poundland Propagandist Peddles Permanently Pessimistic Predictions

“very strong probability of global average temperature rising by much more than 2°C above its preindustrial level by the end of this century.”

“unless the upward trend in annual emissions is reversed, the world will be all but condemned to global warming of more than 2°C, creating a prehistoric climate not seen since the Pliocene epoch 3 million years ago, when the polar icecaps were much smaller and global sea level was about 20 metres higher”

“Basic physics suggest that global warming should affect the occurrence of extreme weather.”

“Global sea level is also rising by more than 3mm per year, which means surges that are generated by storms over large bodies of water are also becoming higher.”

Scottish Sceptic: The Climate wars – toward a washup review.

This is a partial reblog of a post by the Scottish sceptic. Head on over to his site to read the full article.

The Climate wars – toward a washup review.
the Scottish Sceptic

…………………………..Time…………………………….

As I said a while back (The limits of Climate Hysteria) we’ve now reached the stage in these “climate wars” whereby the climate itself is the main combatant forcing the ranks of the delusional public academia, to be dragged kicking and screaming to the reality of our ever varying climate, as the climate itself now imposes discipline where the idiots in the so called “institutions” of so-called “science” failed.

In other words, when we only had a few years of data and a lot of climate variables, it was far far too easy to “investigate” the most worrying trends and then to further cherry pick the data. Then to write up this cherry picked data and publish in buddy review journals, put on Wikipedia as “settled science” and try to convince the world your religion has a credible basis. But, the more data that is acquired and the more people look into every nook and cranny and not just the short-term worrisome trends, the more the real picture of a continuously varying climate emerges and so the less important any one short-term change appears. The more people who gather data, the less any individual can cherry-pick the data to e.g. claim “snow is disappearing” in a warm winter or “floods are increasing” in a floody year or “droughts are increasing” in a dry year.

Oooh Look! A Squirrel!

The BBC reports on a major new source of ‘carbon’. apparently, squirrels are going to kill us all according to climate scientist Dr Sue Natali, from Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts.

If ground squirrels are adding nitrogen to an area – and that area doesn’t have plants because they dug them up – this may result in increased loss of carbon from the system

Watch out for those tree felling squirrels, a falling tree will kill you as surely as a falling wind turbine.

Search for the missing heat to continue: No sleep ’til Paris

Nice Freudian slip from Suzanne Goldenberg, or Grauniad typo? You decide.

Michael Mann: Lima Climate Conference plug: Buy my book! – Pleeeze

Poor old Michael Mann is trying to offload copies of his fantasy novel about how he beat Steve McIntyre. I suspect our readers might have other ideas about where it should be stuffed rather than in a Christmas stocking. Only one retweet in the last 2 hours… I thought we should help him along a bit.

Ed Miliband: “I believe tackling climate change is the most important thing I can do in politics”

Ed Miliband has set out his stall at last. Now we know what his priorities are if he is elected as prime minister.

From the Standard

The environment may not be as fashionable an issue now as it was when David Cameron attached a wind turbine to his house. But I believe tackling climate change is the most important thing I can do in politics for the long-term future of my kids and their generation.

I will not leave those principles behind at the door to Downing Street. That is the choice the country will face at the next election: a Conservative government that … makes Britain a laggard on climate change, or a Labour government that leads.

So there you have it. By conflating ‘the environment’ with ‘global warming’, Ed Miliband hopes to hoodwink the British public into supporting his rich mates in their quest to rob us into poverty and ruin the country’s economy with the international wealth redistribution scheme which masquerades as ‘climate action’.

BBC bias gets imperialistic: recolonises Australia

This is the second half of an article on the UK website Conservative Woman. Check out the link to Jo Nova’s article too.

Back in October, behind the masquerade of what the BBC’s army of 180 publicists claim is the world’s ‘most trusted media brand’, the Corporation launched with a glossy release a multi-pronged initiative to broadcast to Australia material about the G20 summit.

Chris Davies, Director of Sales and Marketing, for BBC Global News Limited, one of the BBC’s subsidiaries that is the engine of the growth, said: “Australia is a priority market for us and with this local market investment together with our large network of international journalists, we are uniquely placed to offer readers stories they don’t normally hear from local media, giving them the full picture on news that affects them.”

Excuse me? That sounds very like the BBC believes ‘local media’ are not doing their job. How very patronising.  Those colonialist oiks have not had the benefit of the BBC’s version of ‘impartiality’.