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?

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.

Elected: I’m now vice chair at my local UKIP branch

We held our local UKIP branch AGM last night where I was elected as vice chair and webcomms officer. I’m looking foward to working more closely with my committee colleagues Craig Sweaton (chair & media comms), Anne Murgatroyd (secretary) and Phil Banks (treasurer). The mainstream media is mis-portraying what UKIP stand for, so I thought I’d republish this short piece from Stuart O’Reilly at Oxford University to counter the misinformation:

Stuart O’Reilly

There seems to be an awful lot of misinformation about UKIP. And believe me, if the discourses were true, I would certainly not be a member. We’ve had a few problematic characters: Godfrey Bloom and David Silvester being those that Oxford students will probably be the most familiar with. But our goals are far too important for us to be deterred by such people.

‘UKIP dislikes immigrants, right?’ Wrong. The vast majority of immigrants come to Britain to contribute, socially and economically. But our immigration system is flawed. We have a huge oversupply in the labour market, particularly in relation to unskilled and low skilled workers. It cannot be right that our government increasingly adds to this problem by having an open-door policy. The result is that wages are driven down, people are exploited and unemployment remains relatively unchanged. UKIP want a points-based system that does not discriminate against people from Africa, Asia and South America as the government’s current policy does.

Internet freedom: ‘Don’t Spy On Us’ launched in the UK today

We can do this. Today, people around the world are coming together to say no more.

GCHQ in the UK and the NSA in America are hoovering up your personal data when you visit websites, send emails and texts, make calls and use social media and sharing the data with each other.

When I first heard these revelations from Edward Snowden, it was overwhelming. Now though, we’ve got an ambitious plan to change UK surveillance for good.

The Day We Fight Back is today.

Internet freedom and privacy rally: GCHQ and NSA under the spotlight

On Tuesday, internet users all over the world are standing up to say no to GCHQ and the NSA’s mass surveillance. Over the last eight months we’ve heard plenty about how intelligence agencies monitor us on the Internet.

Our surveillance laws have let the intelligence agencies extend their reach deep into our private lives.Tuesday 11th February is The Day We Fight Back.

Climate debate: Lord Monckton vs HRH Prince Charles

Following HRH Prince Charles intemperate remarks about ‘headless chickens’ reported at the talkshop last week, Lord Monckton has written him an open letter, reproduced below.

His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales,
Clarence House, London.

Candlemas, 2014

Your Royal Highness’ recent remarks describing those who have scientific and economic reason to question the Establishment opinion on climatic apocalypse in uncomplimentary and unroyal terms as “headless chickens” mark the end of our constitutional monarchy and a return to the direct involvement of the Royal Family, in the Person of our future king, no less, in the cut and thrust of partisan politics.

Now that Your Royal Highness has offered Your Person as fair game in the shootout of politics, I am at last free to offer two options. I need no longer hold back, as so many have held back, as Your Royal Highness’ interventions in politics have become more frequent and less acceptable in their manner as well as in their matter.

Tim Cullen: Phi in the sky: As Above – So Below

Guest post by Tim Cullen covering natural philosophy from pre-historic Scotland, Plato and Kepler to a sub-atomic theory developed by an eminently well qualified nuclear physicist.

The renaissance of Natural Philosophy in the Renaissance period laid the foundation stones which enabled the construction of the modern scientific edifice.

The Renaissance also renewed interest in anti-Aristotelian theories of nature considered as an organic, living whole comprehensible independently of theology, as in the work of Nicholas of Cusa, Nicholas Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Telesius, and Tommaso Campanella.

EU Referendum pledges: A brief review

As the majority of people in this country know, we urgently need out of the unsustainable EU. We also know better then to trust snake oil salesmen promising solutions to our problems; if we’ll just give them our trust and money now, they’ll cure our ills later. Sure.

Even if the House of Turncoats hadn’t blocked the private members bill for a 2017 referendum, passing one wouldn’t make it a done deal. Parliament cannot bind it’s successor. Which means the latest part of the charade whence David Cameron says he’ll use the Parliament act to force through an E.U. referendum Bill to be brought forward in the next session is just that. A charade.

Broken promises, delays, obfuscation, lies, double-dealings. Enough of that. Let’s turn the forthcoming three elections into referenda. If you want out of the E.U. superstate plan, vote UKIP, and keep voting UKIP. Vote UKIP twice on May 22nd, for MEP’s and local councillors. Then Vote UKIP again in the general election in 2015. Because we really do mean what we say about listening to the people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ls60Wbq_dk

Alexa Traffic Rank for the Talkshop vs Realclimate

It seems that the Bloggies have decided to axe the ‘Best science or technology blog’ category this year, probably due to the amount of earache the organisers were getting from the usual suspects about the climate sceptic blogs consistently packing the category finals. So I thought I’d get my own back by publishing a comparison of global traffic rank for the talkshop vs flagship global warming science site realclimate.org

Stitch that Gavin.

But surely Realclimate will beat the tiny Talkshop on its home turf in the US? Let’s have a look:

Prince Charles: climate change deniers are ‘headless chickens’

HRH Prince Charles voices strong opinions regarding those who reject the hypothesis that human influence on the Earth’s climate is likely to lead to catastrophic change. Speaking at a prizegiving for young sustainability entrepreneurs he had the following to say, as reported by the Telegraph:

“It is baffling, I must say, that in our modern world we have such blind trust in science and technology that we all accept what science tells us about everything – until, that is, it comes to climate science.

“All of a sudden, and with a barrage of sheer intimidation, we are told by powerful groups of deniers that the scientists are wrong and we must abandon all our faith in so much overwhelming scientific evidence.

“So, thank goodness for our young entrepreneurs here this evening, who have the far-sightedness and confidence in what they know is happening to ignore the headless chicken brigade and do something practical to help.”

Lord Monckton: Letter to Martin Rasmussen of Copernicus Publications

A week ago,  Christopher Monckton wrote a letter to Martin Rasmussen at Copernicus Publishing, to protest the preremptory closure of journal ‘Pattern Recognition in Physics’, following its publication of our special issue on ‘Pattern in solar variability, their planetary origin and terrestrial impacts’. No reply has been received, and so true to the timeline set out in the latter, he has asked me to publish it here at the talkshop. This document pulls no punches in highlighting the hypocrisy of those who seek to control scientific debate through censorship. Considering the publishers name, and the fact that our research was initiated by Johannes Kepler four centuries ago, a rich irony is in play here.

UPDATE 30-1-2014: Jo Nova has posted an article on the relaunch of PRP proposed by Lord Monckton

Dear Mr. Rasmussen,

Closure and reopening of the learned journal Pattern Recognition in Physics

My kind friend Professor Niklas Mörner of Stockholm, who in close to 50 years has
published approaching 600 papers in the reviewed and general scientific literature, is an
internationally-renowned expert on sea level and is one of the most gifted instructors of
students I have ever had the pleasure to work with, has copied me in on your sad and,
indeed, bizarre decision to bring to an end the excellent learned journal Pattern Recognition
in Physics, less than a year after its first publication in March 2013.

Lord Monckton: “Copernicus is acting outside mainstream science”

Lord Christopher Monckton offers his thoughts on the Copernicus – Galileogate scandal; the imprisonment of our special edition of PRP behind a front page with no links on it:

Let us wait and see how Copernicus responds to my offer to take over the journal for which it has no further use. It is a shame that a once-respectable publishing house could have censored its own journal in this cack-handed fashion when all it had to do – if it were genuinely concerned that not enough outside reviews had been obtained – was to ask the editors to gather further reviews from external scrutineers.

However, it is plain from the original email sent by the publishers to Professor Moerner that their true reason for attempting (unsuccessfully) to kill off the journal was that its authors had reached a conclusion that – in the mildest way – suggested that the decline in solar activity they now expected would countervail to some extent against any warming effect from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades, so that the accelerated warming predicted by the IPCC might not occur, at least in the short term. [Editorial note] That this was the primary reason originally given can be seen in the webcitation linked above. Click image to view.

Giovanni P. Gregori: Scientific Freedom, paradigms and dogma

prof. Giovanni P. Gregori – Docente di Fisica Terrestre e ricercatore CNR all’Istituto di Acustica O.M.Corbino C.N.R. di Roma. 1963-2001 Ricercatore CNR all’IFA/CNR (Istituto di Fisica dell’Atmosfera), Roma, con l’incarico di studiare le Relazioni Sole-Terra. Le aurore polari ed il geomagnetismo (1963-1975) lo hanno portato ad un modello di magnetosfera (1970-1972) considerato uno dei suoi migliori risultati.

One of our merry band of collaborators on our Special Edition of Pattern Recognition in Physics, the journal axed by executive officer Martin Rasmussen of parent publishing house Copernicus, and castigated by science blogger Anthony Watts, is Italian physics professor Giovanni P. Gregori. here’s the letter he sent to Rasmussen:

Martin Rasmussen, Esq.,
Copernicus Publications.

Ref.: Pattern Recognition in Physics

Dear Mr. Rasmussen,

following the letter by the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, I guess I have to spend a few words on this unfortunate controversy.

I like to begin and recall a few statements by Jules-Henri Poincaré (1854-1912).

“La liberté est pour la Science ce que l’air est pour l’animal”
[“Freedom is for Science much like air for an animal”
Dernières pensées, appendice III]

“La pensée ne doit jamais se soumettre, ni à un dogme, ni à un parti,
ni à une passion, ni à un intérêt, ni à une idée”
[“Never submit thought to any dogma, or to any party,
or to any passion, or to any interest, or to any idea”]

“La pensée n’est qu’un éclair au milieu d’une longue nuit.
Mais c’est cet éclair qui est tout”
[“Thought is like a lightning in the middle of a long night.
But this lightning is everything”]

Science is made of ideas, both correct and wrong. How can we assess what is correct if this is not compared with what is wrong? Observations, models, extrapolations, forecast, etc. are not science. They are only tentative applications of science. But science is made of ideas.

Peer Review Debacle: Friends and Foes in the Fog of Battle

The view from my bedroom window yesterday morning

 

There’s nothing like a good strong ethics controversy to sort out friends from foes, and the last five days have been decisive in laying out the battle lines. The trouble started when James Annan whipped up an email campaign directed at science publisher Copernicus, complaining about our Special Edition of Pattern Recognition in Physics. Although the various proponent authors of the Planetary Solar Theory have different ideas about viable mechanisms we came to the same conclusions via different phenomenological methods: that an imminent solar slowdown is upon us, and it is likely to be deeper than the Dalton Minimum, possibly stretching until the latter decades of this century.

In the General conclusions paper all the contributing authors signed, we agreed that “This sheds serious doubts on the issue of a continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project”. This did not please the proponents of the ‘trace gas levels control Earth’s climate’ theory, AKA cAGW, and emails trickled into Copernicus headquarters in Gottingen, Germany.

Breaking: Pattern Recognition in Physics Axed by Copernicus

A conclusion and its implication in the summary paper was: because our scientific investigation leads us to the prediction that the Sun is headed into a protracted minimum, the warming forecast by the IPCC might not happen.

This has led to the journal being axed by the parent Publishing house Copernicus. The papers are still available at this link
Please download and disseminate them widely.

Heres the letter sent to Coordinating editor Nils Axel Mörner and chief editor Sid Ali Ouadfeul:

Andrew McKillop: We Must be Near Peak Crisis by Now

Guest post from Andrew McKiIllop

The World is allegedly Grossly Overpopulated
Writing for the site PeakProsperity, Adam Taggart in early January republished a 2013 presentation by Bill Ryerson of the US Population Institute repeating all the known arguments about exponential population growth but only arithmetic growth (or no growth at all) of the resources we need, think we need, or might some day need. The long discussion by Bill Ryerson was honest by kicking off with the straight admission that talking about population management is inflammatory. Arguing for ZPG or zero population growth is accused by some as “crypto fascist” at worst and misanthropic at best, but early-2014 news includes the fact that Japan – the world leader in ZPG – recorded its highest-ever annual decline of population in 2013, with a loss of about 245 000 citizens. Japan’s contraction of population is now running at about 1 million every 4 years, and can easily accelerate.

Doug Proctor: Essay on West and beyond

Doug has posted an essay[1], book review with wider commentary

I’m reading “American Betrayal”, by Diana West, macmillan (2013).

It is concerned with not the fact of Soviet influence (through placement and support of specific pro-Communist figures in the WWII+) American government, but with the refusal to recognize American political (and military and intelligence) life had been infiltrated by agents working against American (and British) best interests. Her book is a polemic, unfortunately, a rant written in a self-indulgent way that will be easy to dismiss as shrieking from a soapbox in Hyde Park. But her point is extremely well made and very, very pertinent to our on-going fight about CAGW: it is not the facts that are in dispute but the “implication” (her term) of those facts. To accept the implication of Soviet penetration is to accept that our view of the last 70 years is false, that the control and decision-making of our wise fathers was not for our but of Stalinist betterment. This is a paradigm shift that is simply unacceptable so as each unassailable point comes up, something is done to destroy the reputation of the teller, or negate the point as a “detail” within a broader, “normal” background.

Sound familiar?

Randy Schekman Nobel winner boycotts top science journals

The Hindu are carrying a syndicated piece by The Guardian (UK) to which I do not want to link.

Randy Schekman says his lab will no longer send papers to Nature, Cell and Science as they distort scientific process

Leading academic journals are distorting the scientific process and represent a “tyranny” that must be broken, according to a Nobel prize winner who has declared a boycott on the publications.

Randy Schekman, a US biologist who won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine this year and receives his prize in Stockholm on Tuesday, said his lab would no longer send research papers to the top-tier journals, Nature, Cell and Science.

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/nobel-winner-boycotts-top-science-journals/article5443113.ece

Richard Tol: Submission to Parliamentary Inquiry into the IPCC

Reposted from Richard Tol’s blog

I welcome the inquiry by the Select Committee into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The focus of the inquiry is on Working Group I of the IPCC and its Fifth Assessment Report, neither of which are in my core areas of experience and expertise. I was a contributing author to IPCC WG1 AR3; I was a lead author in a few reports of WG2 and WG3; I am currently a convening lead author for WG2 AR5. I will therefore address only a few of the issues raised by the Select Committee.

· How effective is AR5 and the summary for policymakers in conveying what is meant by uncertainty in scientific terms ? Would a focus on risk rather than uncertainty be useful?

The agreed distinction between risk and uncertainty goes back to Knight (1921), with risk characterized by known probabilities (the throw of a dice) and uncertainty by unknown probabilities. Climate change is better described by uncertainty than by risk. In other arenas the IPCC has tried to redefine widely accepted concepts (e.g., vulnerability) which has led to endless, fruitless discussions on semantics. It would be regrettable if the IPCC would repeat this mistake with regard to risk and uncertainty.

Top US News Orgs. Teach UK Parliament Some Democracy

This needs etching on a large steel sheet and nailgunning to the door of Parliament:

December 2, 2013

OPEN LETTER TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE:

As news organizations, editors, and journalists who often report on government actions
that officials seek to keep secret, we write to the Committee on the eve of the forthcoming
appearance of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to express our grave concern over pointed calls
by those in authority for censorship of The Guardian and criminal prosecution of its journalists in
the name of national security. Such sanctions, and the chilling impact created by even the threat
to impose them, undermine the independence and integrity of the press that are essential for
democracy to function.