The Heathrow Airport Climate Protesters Are Going to Jail. Good

Oli Scarff/Getty

The #Heathrow13 – climate activists convicted of trespassing on and disrupting Britain’s busiest airport – have been told by the judge that they face jail sentences.

Oh how the heart bleeds!

According to a small group of green protesters who have gathered outside the magistrates court this represents a terrible travesty of justice. Apparently this will be the first time in the UK anyone has ever been jailed for protesting about climate change.

“A disgrace” says (terrorist-supporting, hard-left) Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell.

“Deeply unjust” says Green MP Caroline Lucas.

No, Caroline, love, what’s really unjust is this: thousands of holidaymakers and business travellers making their way to the airport to catch planes only to miss their flights because a bunch of spoiled trustafarians, unemployable Environmental Sciences graduates and professional wasters have gone and cut through the perimeter fence and lain down on the runway.

One of the idiots – it goes almost without saying – was dressed as a polar bear.

Another of the idiots – again, it almost goes without saying – holds a PhD in climate science from the University of East Anglia (aka the University of Easy Access). And guess who her course supervisor was (h/t Paul Matthews at Bishop Hill). Why – the story gets better and better – it was none other than Phil Jones, the disgraced head of the Climatic Research Unit, as featured so unimpressively in the Climategate emails.

Nobody is suggesting that dressing up as a polar bear or studying Environmental Sciences under Phil Jones ought to be punishable by imprisonment. (Though I don’t think it would do any harm if a few of us wrote to the Home Secretary urging the law to be tightened up in this regard).

But only an utter loon would argue that the right to free protest extended to being given a free pass to ruin people’s holidays, disrupt their business meetings, jeopardise security and cause millions and millions of pounds of economic damage.

This is what is so reprehensible and unjust about so many of the previous decisions made by the courts on environmental issues. The Kingsnorth power station protest, for example.

Kingsnorth was the case in 2008 when a group of Greenpeace protesters successfully defended themselves against a charge of criminal damage (£30,000 worth to a power station chimney) by pleading “climate change” as their “lawful excuse.”

The court had heard from Professor Jim Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, that the 20,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted daily by Kingsnorth could be responsible for the extinction of up to 400 species. Hansen, a Nasa director who advises Al Gore, the former US presidential candidate turned climate change campaigner, told the court that humanity was in “grave peril”. “Somebody needs to step forward and say there has to be a moratorium, draw a line in the sand and say no more coal-fired power stations.”

It also heard David Cameron’s environment adviser, millionaire environmentalist Zac Goldsmith, and an Inuit leader from Greenland both say climate change was already seriously affecting life around the world. Goldsmith told the court: “By building a coal-power plant in this country, it makes it very much harder [to exert] pressure on countries like China and India” to reduce their burgeoning use of the fossil fuel.

The court was told that some of the property in immediate need of protection included parts of Kent at risk from rising sea levels, the Pacific island state of Tuvalu and areas of Greenland. The defendants also cited the Arctic ice sheet, China’s Yellow River region, the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica, coastal areas of Bangladesh and the city of New Orleans.

The jury was told that Kingsnorth emitted the same amount of carbon dioxide as the 30 least polluting countries in the world combined – and that there were advanced plans to build a new coal-fired power station next to the existing site on the Hoo peninsula.

Amazingly, the judge was swayed by this pseudo-scientific guff.

But that was eight years ago, at the height of the green scare. The judge in the #heathrow13 case appears to be made of more robust stuff.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Lying Climate Scientists Lie Again – About Death Threats, This Time

Fake distress

Climate change protesters at Cancun in 2010

There’s a great scoop in The Australian today about more lying climate scientists making stuff up.

CLAIMS that some of Australia’s leading climate change scientists were subjected to death threats as part of a vicious and unrelenting email campaign have been debunked by the Privacy Commissioner.

Timothy Pilgrim was called in to adjudicate on a Freedom of Information application in relation to Fairfax and ABC reports last June alleging that Australian National University climate change researchers were facing the ongoing campaign and had been moved to “more secure buildings” following explicit threats.

Needless to say the University did everything it could to prevent the investigation, arguing that the release of the climate scientists’ emails (why am I getting an eerie sense of deja vu here?) “would or could reasonably be expected to…endanger the life or physical safety of any person”. But doughty Sydney blogger Simon Turnill appealed against this stonewalling drivel and won. And here’s what was revealed when the 11 relevant emails were eventually released.

Ten of the documents “did not contain threats to kill or threats of harm.”

Of the 11th, the Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim said: “I consider the danger to life or physical safety in this case to be only a possibility, not a real chance.”

No wonder the university was so keen to keep things quiet. Contrary to the claims of the “climate” “scientists” – widely reported, of course, in the left-wing media – there had been no death threats whatsoever. Yet their vice-chancellor at the time – now the Australian government’s Chief Scientist – Professor Ian Chubb decided to move them to “more secure buildings” without, he now admits, having read the emails to see whether these threats actually existed.

Maybe it’s time someone did an FOI to see whether the UEA’s dodgy and discredited Phil Jones really did get any of those “death threats” he claims to have received after Climategate and which allegedly drove him to consider suicide. Speaking for myself, if Phil Jones released a report claiming that grass is green I’d feel compelled to go outside just to double check. You’ll remember that after Climategate, the University of Easy Access’s main concern was not so much to investigate any potential malfeasance by its Climatic Research Unit gang of FOI-breaching, data-fudging, scientific-method-abusing, grant-troughing second-raters as to put the right spin on them. That tame “woe is me” interview Jones gave to a compliant Sunday Times was part of a strategy arranged by the public relations company UEA had employed – no doubt at lavish taxpayer expense – to make the disgraced Jones and his department look more sinned against than sinning.

I’ve a strong suspicion that the emails I get in my inbox most days from the ecoloons who congregate at places like the Guardian’s Komment Macht Frei are far more foul-mouthed, repellant and poisonous than anything these junk scientists have ever received. The difference is, I do my damnedest to stick to the truth and I’m not being paid zillions of pounds or dollars at public expense to promote the most expensive and mendacious scam in the history of science. There’s just no justice is there?

2 thoughts on “Lying climate scientists lie again – about death threats, this time”

john c says:11th May 2012 at 3:11 amI feel I can now throw some light on the matter. The document viewed as most “threatening” referred to an alleged Deliberation at the ANU about climate change in the Canberra region at which one person “made a death threat” (sic) by showing his gun licence and boasting about his skill as a sniper.. Only two people dropped out of the conference only one of those who did so attended the even meal. Me. I am certainly the one who is alleged to show someone their gun licence. That is not true while at the evening meal (of poor quality) comments moved to eating game meat and I was approached by the Commissioner for the Environment ACT, Dr Maxine Cooper who recognized me as someone involved in the kangaroo culling program in the ACT. She politely asked if she could sit at the vacant seat next to me and asked if I had past the recent licence test – not easy. I replied yes and showed her my current licence. I also impressed on any one interested the high standard of marksmanship necessary to allay any cruelty concerns. I might add that earlier in the day I had challenged two speakers to comment on a letter in the Canberra Times that claimed that temperatures had not increased in the Canberra area for decades. They were unable to do so, having not apparently checked the record despite the the “Deliberation” (conference) supposed to be about rising temperatures in the Canberra region. As all daytime conversations were recorded (we all signed waivers to allow this) this can easily be checked.
Peritec1 says:22nd May 2012 at 11:47 pmWe have to be thankful that there are some who can obtain coverage to expose the ABC’s inadequacy. The real problem is that the ABC and the government are impervious to this waste of the community’s resources. Imagine what could happen if they really followed the aims of Richard Boyer

Comments are closed.

Climategate 2.0: The Not Nice and Clueless Phil Jones

Ever since Climategate . . .

Would you trust this man with an adjusted data set?

. . . whenever the UEA’s Phil Jones has appeared on television or been interviewed, he has always come over like a particularly gloomy bloodhound who has just been denied his Bonio. Obviously one can understand this. a) it can’t be fun when your once lavishly funded, globally respected science department is suddenly associated with FOI-breaching, data-losing, evidence-tweaking, scientific-method-abusing junk and b) it of course elides perfectly with the narrative so assiduously and cynically promoted by the science establishment since Climategate: that these poor scientists are men more sinned against then sinning; just honest men trying to do their job while fighting off vexatious FOI requests by nasty strangers like Steve McIntyre and being sent death threats and driven almost to suicide by horrid bloggers and know-nothing non-scientists who will never understand the mysterious ways of the white-coated illuminati with their magically transforming data adjustments and magnificently accurate computer models….

Well fine. Except the Phil Jones who emerges from the Climategate and Climategate 2.0 emails doesn’t sound at all like a man deserving of our pity, let alone our sympathy. In fact he emerges as bullying, irascible, intolerant, incompetent and slippery as an extra-lubricated bag of jellied eel marinaded in KY. The excellent Maurizio Morabito has unearthed a good example of this on his blog, which not only catches Jones up to his usual trick of trying to dodge FOI requests, but scorning a hapless older colleague for having the temerity to teach climate science using actual, proper facts rather than the approved IPCC quasi-religious drivel.

date: Fri Sep 25 10:53:32 2009
from: Phil Jones
subject: Re: [Fwd: CCNet: The Sun Could Be Heading Into A Period of
to: santer1, Tom Wigley
[…] I have stopped sending data out to anybody after the stupid comment on Climate Audit by Peter Webster. We’ve had over 60 FOI requests for data. They are varied – many can be answered by telling people to read the literature. We’re refusing those for the data. We’re going to send an email to all NMSs thru MOHC and then release those where countries are happy for us to do so.
It is just a pain having to respond to them – someone else at UEA does this though.
I did send one of the requests to Myles as it was from one of his fellow profs in Physics at Oxford! Myles knows him well and he has never talked about climate with Myles – or expressed any views. Myles can’t understand why he’s getting his climate education from Climate Audit and not from colleagues in his own dept!
This annoys me too. I’d read up and talk to people if I were to ever attempt moving to another field! It is just common sense. Neil Adger has taken over the running of First Year course here in ENV. He asked Alan Kendall for the ppt for 2 lectures he gives. He sent them and 40 slides are taken from Climate Audit! A student asked Neil why Alan was saying things opposite to what Neil and Tim Osborn were saying!!!

Alan is retiring at the end of this year….thankfully.
Phil

Meanwhile, the Bishop has chanced upon another gem, in which the Grantham Institute’s PR man and palaeopiezometrist Bob Ward forelock-tuggingly requests a steer from Dr Jones only to discover that Jones can’t really help, a) because he obviously can’t be arsed, being too busy eating Christmas pudding and b) because he’s apparently incapable of performing what ought to be – for a man in his position – some fairly routine data analysis.

Here’s Jones flaunting his ignorance:

I keep on seeing people saying this same stupid thing. I’m not adept enough (totally inept) with excel to do this now as no-one who knows how to is here.

What you have to do is to take the numbers in column C (the years) and then those in D (the anomalies for each year), plot them and then work out the linear trend. The slope is upwards. I had someone do this in early 2006, and the trend was upwards then. It will be now. Trend won’t be statistically significant, but the trend is up.

And here’s Cumbrian Lad’s comment below:

The fact that a scientist who is in charge of a major global data set claims not to be able to plot two columns in a spreadsheet is dumbfounding. Not only that, but he feels sure that relatively few people around him could either.

The line “I had someone do this in early 2006…, ” suggests that it is the sort of menial task he’d leave to a non technical assistant. Now, I’ve some time for delegation of appropriate tasks, and keeping the best brains thinking, not engaged in mundane tasks, but data analysis is part of the science surely.

The last time I had a dig at Phil Jones for being “disgraced, FOI-breaching, email-deleting, scientific-method abusing”, his University’s response was to try to use the Press Complaints Commission to bully me into silence. The UEA’s complaint was rejected. Given the latest batch of emails, I think the PCC made the right decision don’t you?

And just to remind ourselves of Jones’s approach to FOI, here is his email in Txt 1577 dated July 28 2009:

CRU is considered by the climate community as a data centre, but we don’t
have any resources to undertake this work. Any work we have done in the past
is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve
discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are
happy about not releasing the original station data.

I’m sure US readers will be delighted that their Dept of Energy endorses the withholding of publicly funded scientific data from researchers.

And here he is again in May 2009 (txt 2440) advising on how best to evade FOI:

I’ve been told that IPCC is
above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5
would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.

I agree with George Monbiot, whose immediate response to Climategate was that Phil Jones should go. On the evidence of these emails, he is unfit to run a bath, let alone one of the world’s most important temperature data sets.

2 thoughts on “Climategate 2.0: the not nice and clueless Phil Jones”

Ian Summerell says:25th November 2011 at 10:18 pmThe email that had me rolling around on the floor with laughter is from our old friend Prof Jones to Thomas Stocker regarding the Freedom of Information Acts and the IPCC.Email [2440] from: Phil Jones to: Thomas Stocker subject: Re: Data access and IPCC
I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember to do it.

They think that they have the divine right of kings and are above the law. Because they work for the IPCC they believe that they can delete all the emails to hide their criminal scam. I’d like to remind Prof Jones that someone did not remember to delete the emails. They are all over the internet and called Climategate 2.0.
1. Nige says:26th November 2011 at 8:57 pm“Scepticism is … directed against the view of the opposition and against minor ramifications of one’s own basic ideas, never against the basic ideas themselves. Attacking the basic ideas evokes taboo reactions … scientists only rarely solve their problems, they make lots of mistakes … one collects ‘facts’ and prejudices, one discusses the matter, and one finally votes. But while a democracy makes some effort to explain the process so that everyone can understand it, scientists either conceal it, or bend it … No scientist will admit that voting plays a role in his subject. Facts, logic, and methodology alone decide – this is what the fairy-tale tells us. … This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else … It is the vote of everyone concerned that decides fundamental issues … and not the authority of big-shots hiding behind a non-existing methodology. … Science itself uses the method of ballot, discussion, vote, though without a clear grasp of its mechanism, and in a heavily biased way.”– Professor Paul Feyerabend, “Against Method”, 1975, final chapter.
  “The notion that a scientific idea cannot be considered intellectually respectable until it has first appeared in a ‘peer’ reviewed journal did not become widespread until after World War II. Copernicus’s heliocentric system, Galileo’s mechanics, Newton’s grand synthesis – these ideas never appeared first in journal articles. They appeared first in books, reviewed prior to publication only by their authors, or by their authors’ friends. … Darwinism indeed first appeared in a journal, but one under the control of Darwin’s friends. … the refereeing process works primarily to enforce orthodoxy. … ‘peer’ review is NOT peer review.”
  
  – Professor Frank J. Tipler, Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?
  
  In 2006, the bestsellers by Lee Smolin and Peter Woit “Not Even Wrong” and “The Trouble with Physics” were published, showing that superstring theory has become a dogmatic consensus, like epicycles being “defended” by less-than-objective methods. Right on cue, the world’s greatest genius behind M-theory, Ed Witten, happened to write a letter to Nature (v. 444, p. 265, 16 November 2006), headlined:
  
  “Answering critics can add fuel to controversy.
  
  “SIR — Your Editorial “To build bridges, or to burn them” and News Feature “In the name of nature” raise important points about criticism of science and how scientists should best respond (Nature 443, 481 and 498–501; 2006). The News Feature concerns radical environmentalists and animal-rights activists, but the problem covers a wider area, often involving more enlightened criticism of science from outside the scientific establishment and even, sometimes, from within.
  
  “The critics feel … that their viewpoints have been unfairly neglected by the establishment. … They bring into the public arena technical claims that few can properly evaluate. … We all know examples from our own fields … Responding to this kind of criticism can be very difficult. It is hard to answer unfair charges of élitism without sounding élitist to
  non-experts. A direct response may just add fuel to controversies. Critics, who are often prepared to devote immense energies to their efforts, can thrive on the resulting ‘he said,
  she said’ situation. [Critics must never be permitted to thrive.] “Scientists in this type of situation would do well to heed the advice in Nature’s Editorial. Keep doing what you are doing. And when you have the chance, try to patiently explain why what you are doing is interesting and exciting, and may even be useful one day.
  
  “Edward Witten
  Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein Drive,
  Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA.”
  
  The next letter on that Nature page (from genetics engineer Boris Striepen) stated: “How and why did our public image
  change from harmless geeks to state- and industry-sponsored evil-doers worthy to be a target? More importantly, what do we do about it? And how do we communicate more effectively what we are doing, why we are doing it and what the opportunities and challenges of modern science are?”
  
  The whole reason why “scientists” get depreciated today is the reason why famous mathematical physicist Ptolemy was depreciated in history: an insistence on patiently “explaining” to critics “why what you are doing is interesting and exciting, and may even be useful one day.” Self-deluded egotistical dictatorship is not an adequate response to critics of nonsense hype that censors alternative ideas. It is exactly what a bad politician does when in serious difficulty. It amounts to dictatorship: ignoring the criticism and then stereotyping all critics as ignorant morons who will benefit from a little “nickel-worth of free advice,” or educational brainwashing in mainstream dogma.
  
  “Centralization of information and decision-making at the top has been destructive to most organizations. The Greeks had a word for the notion that the best decisions can only be made on the basis of the fullest information at the highest level. They called it hubris. In a living scientific organization, decisions must be pushed down to the lowest level at which they can be sensibly made. … Leadership would be decentralized throughout, not concentrated at the top. … It would also facilitate the downward transmission of goals, the only things that can be usefully passed down from above, and make room for the upward transmission of results, which should be the basis for reward. It should be obvious that this structure need not be imposed from above. There is no reason to await a decision from the top to do so. Everyone in the chain has the flexibility to organize his own life and thereby to decide whether he is to be a manager or a leader.”
  
  – Gregory H. Canavan, The Leadership of Philosopher Kings, Los Alamos National Laboratory, report LA-12198-MS, December 1992.

Comments are closed.

Uh oh, global warming loons: here comes Climategate II!

Breaking news:

Two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.

In other words, what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism. This, it seems, is what motivated the whistleblower ‘FOIA 2011’ (or “thief”, as the usual suspects at RealClimate will no doubt prefer to tar him or her) to go public.

As FOIA 2011 puts it when introducing the selected highlights, culled from a file of 220,000 emails:

“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”

“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”

“One dollar can save a life” — the opposite must also be true.

“Poverty is a death sentence.”

“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”

Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on
hiding the decline.

FOIA 2011 is right, of course. If you’re going to bomb the global economy back to the dark ages with environmental tax and regulation, if you’re going to favour costly, landscape-blighting, inefficient renewables over real, abundant, relatively cheap energy that works like shale gas and oil, if you’re going to cause food riots and starvation in the developing world by giving over farmland (and rainforests) to biofuel production, then at the very least you it owe to the world to base your policies on sound, transparent, evidence-based science rather than on the politicised, disingenuous junk churned out by the charlatans at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

You’ll find the full taster menu of delights here at Tall Bloke’s website.Shrub Niggurath is on the case too. As is the Air Vent.

I particularly like the ones expressing deep reservations about the narrative put about by the IPCC:

/// The IPCC Process ///

<1939> Thorne/MetO:

Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary […]
<3066> Thorne:

I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

<1611> Carter:

It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much
talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by
a select core group.

<2884> Wigley:

Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive […] there have been a number of
dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC […]
<4755> Overpeck:

The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s
included and what is left out.

<3456> Overpeck:

I agree w/ Susan [Solomon] that we should try to put more in the bullet about
“Subsequent evidence” […] Need to convince readers that there really has been
an increase in knowledge – more evidence. What is it?

And here’s our friend Phil Jones, apparently trying to stuff the IPCC working groups with scientists favourable to his cause, while shutting out dissenting voices.

<0714> Jones:

Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital – hence my comment about
the tornadoes group.

<3205> Jones:

Useful ones [for IPCC] might be Baldwin, Benestad (written on the solar/cloud
issue – on the right side, i.e anti-Svensmark), Bohm, Brown, Christy (will be
have to involve him ?)

Here is what looks like an outrageous case of government – the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – actually putting pressure on climate “scientists” to talk up their message of doom and gloom in order to help the government justify its swingeing climate policies:

<2495> Humphrey/DEFRA:

I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a
message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their
story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made
to look foolish.

Here is a gloriously revealing string of emails in which activists and global warming research groups discuss how best to manipulate reality so that climate change looks more scary and dangerous than it really is:

<3655> Singer/WWF:

we as an NGO working on climate policy need such a document pretty soon for the
public and for informed decision makers in order to get a) a debate started and
b) in order to get into the media the context between climate
extremes/desasters/costs and finally the link between weather extremes and
energy

<0445> Torok/CSIRO:
[…] idea of looking at the implications of climate change for what he termed
“global icons” […] One of these suggested icons was the Great Barrier Reef […] It also became apparent that there was always a local “reason” for the
destruction – cyclones, starfish, fertilizers […] A perception of an
“unchanging” environment leads people to generate local explanations for coral
loss based on transient phenomena, while not acknowledging the possibility of
systematic damage from long-term climatic/environmental change […] Such a
project could do a lot to raise awareness of threats to the reef from climate
change

<4141> Minns/Tyndall Centre:

In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public
relations problem with the media

Kjellen:

I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global
warming

Pierrehumbert:

What kind of circulation change could lock Europe into deadly summer heat waves
like that of last summer? That’s the sort of thing we need to think about.

I’ll have a deeper dig through the emails this afternoon and see what else I come up with. If I were a climate activist off to COP 17 in Durban later this month, I don’t think I’d be feeling a very happy little drowning Polie, right now. In fact I might be inclined to think that the game was well and truly up.

2 thoughts on “Uh oh, global warming loons: here comes Climategate II!”

Gordonrear says:27th November 2011 at 5:26 pmQuote mining? Oh great Delingpole, is that how your science works? Oh look, here’s somemore quote mining…
Keith Briffa “picture of the unprecedented warming over the last millennium or so”

Andrew Kerr “a bleak future for the environment, already suffering from the serious impacts of global warming including rising sea-levels, rising sea temperatures, and increased extreme weather patterns to name just a few,”

That’s why they look at the overall picture, that’s why the IPCC AR4 has over 1500 reviewers, that’s why they have a consensus amongst those in the field (something you will never comprehend), because scientists will have opinions, will agree and disagree, will argue, will debate. Why don’t you release your decade worth of private emails to the public, let the public start quote mining you on whether you’re just a half crazed wingnut.
Archive Protocol says:28th November 2011 at 1:31 pm“FOIA” deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to forestall the impoverishment of humanity by another $37 trillion. But I don’t think I’ll hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Comments are closed.

Climate Change: An Emetic Fallacy

May 12, 2011

personally I prefer mine with fruit….

Yesterday I was at Downing College, Cambridge, for a Climate Change conference organised by Professor Alan Howard, the scientist/philanthropist/entrepreneur known, inter alia, for having devised the Cambridge diet and for funding the magnificent lecture hall in which the event took place. (For more reporting – and some brilliant cartoons from Josh who sat right next to me sketching in a most impressive way – see Bishop Hill; and many, many thanks to the Howard Trust for organising it.)

The big difference between this and almost any other Climate Change conference is that it was the first – in Britain, anyway, so far as I know – to field a solid team of scientists from both sides of the debate. The Warmists included Professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit, Professor Andrew Watson – also of the UEA and Professor John Mitchell, former chief scientist at the Met Office. The Sceptics – Realists if you prefer – included Professor Henrik Svensmark, Professor Nils-Axel Morner, and Professor Ian Plimer. Any mention of “Climategate” announced Prof Howard at the beginning would result in immediate ejection: he wanted to keep this event civil and scientific.

So no, I didn’t go up and introduce myself to Phil Jones as the man who made him world famous. I think he may have given me a long, hard, hollow stare at breakfast yesterday morning; and there was a dodgy moment during a coffee break where he perched his cup near me, suddenly noticed the danger, and fled elsewhere. But I certainly wasn’t going to bother him, not least because I think he cut a rather pitiable figure. His talk – essentially on why the CRU’s adjusted temperature figures are kosher – was slightly nervy and resolutely dull. I got the impression he now wishes climate science were just an apolitical backwater in which yer average PhD could happily eke out his career untroubled by the kind of controversy which has all but ruined Jones’s life.

Some of the presentations were excellent. It was particularly good to hear Professor Svensmark make his compelling case (which no one on the other side could successfully refute) on cosmic rays and cloud formation. But overall, I shared the disappointment expressed by one of the final speakers, Czech President Vaclav Klaus that there had been almost no honest, open debate between the two sides. One side made its case; then the other put its contradictory case. But apart from a bit of snide questioning and the odd sniping shot from the wings, there wasn’t much by way of robust exchanging of ideas. It was more – as Klaus noted – a series of monologues.

You’d have to be very naive, though, to conclude that the fault lay on both sides and that if only they could communicate with one another we’d all attain the sensible middle ground position where wisdom, truth and sweet reasonableness resides. That would be to fall for what I call the “Dog S*** Yoghurt Fallacy.”

It goes like this: one side of this debate thinks that the best thing to put in yoghurt is fruit; the other side is of the view that what really needs to be added to yoghurt is a nice bit of dog poo. Now suppose we were to compromise. Suppose the latter faction were to concede sufficient ground to agree that only a tiny quantity of dog poo should go into the mainly fruit-rich yoghurt, would this constitute a victory for commonsense?

Of course it wouldn’t. Even if just the smallest, smidgen of a fraction of dog poo were to go into that yoghurt it would still be irredeemably tainted. Similar rules apply to the current debate on global warming. On one side – what you might call the fruit side – you have those scientists, economists and, yes, bloggers who maintain that CO2 is a generally beneficial trace gas which encourages plant growth and poses no risk of catastrophic global warming. On the other side – the dog poo side, obviously – you have “scientists”, politicians, spivs, rent-seekers, cranks, whackos, eco-loons, EU fonctionnaires and such like who believe that CO2 poses a major problem to global climate and must be taxed and regulated to oblivion.

Which side is right? One of the very few things which emerged from yesterday’s debate with pellucid clarity was this:

WE DON’T KNOW.

The Warmist scientists are quite capable of talking a good game about their belief system, even to the point – almost – of being persuasive on the subject of their computer “projections” of future global temperatures.

But then, so too are the Sceptics. You’d need to be very set in your belief system indeed to come away from one of Professor Ian Plimer’s feisty, funny engaging lectures and not be convinced that the whole idea of AGW is a complete crock. Same goes for Professor Nils Axel Morner’s hilarious, crazy-Swede lecture on his experiences measuring sea-level rises in the Maldives (there hasn’t been any: whatever the Maldives president and his underwater cabinet tell you). Same also goes for Prof Svensmark: really his cosmic ray theory is gloriously compelling.

In other words there is still an enormous amount of uncertainty out there about the chaotic system which causes climate. But here’s the rub: global policy makers are acting as if there isn’t.

And the reason they’re acting as if there isn’t because, essentially, they have been hijacked by the scientists on the Warmist side who – behaving far more like political activists than dispassionate seekers after truth – have exaggerated the strength of their case, even to the point of tweaking their data and suppressing contradictory research, in order to ensure that their “correct” interpretation of reality is the one that prevails.

This was the whole point of the Climategate scandal and why it mattered. And since Climategate – as we saw from the entirely unapologetic, nay struttingly arrogant in some cases – behaviour of the Warmist scientists present absolutely zip-all has changed.

Hence Dr Klaus’s frustration. Apart from being the only European leader (apart from Hungary’s) worth his salt, Dr Klaus is also an economist and a former serf of a Communist state.

He said: “The arrogance of global warming activists and their fellow travellers in politics is something I know well from the past. They wish to suppress truth, control the market and dictate policy and I, who have spent most of my time living under communism feel obliged to warn against it.”

28 Responses to “Climate Change: an emetic fallacy”

Daragh McDowell says:May 12, 2011 at 12:57 pmSo are you actually going to report on this (http://www.grist.org/list/2011-05-11-nine-of-the-ten-loudest-climate-denying-scientists-tied-to-exxon) or just pretend it didn’t happen?
James Delingpole says:May 12, 2011 at 1:43 pmYou are an amusing, angry fellow Daraaaaghh to be sure you are you are so it is. And who do you think funds the Carbon Brief? The Tooth Fairy?
James W says:May 13, 2011 at 5:39 amDaragh – howabout Al Gore’s links to ‘big oil’?
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=468

On the whole……..I’d trust the blokes who don’t wish to over-regulate and over-tax our lives, and on balance these seem to be ‘realists’/’sceptics’.

Of course the climate is changing, it has done since the Earth was born – but I sincerely doubt that our emissions are responsible………..I’m far more worried about the effect on man’s intervention in respect of major lakes and river confluences, and of course the denudation of the oceans and fish stocks.

Thing is the big beasts of AGW are not at all interested in these problems – probably because there are no sinecure academic posts to be had because governments can’t tax and regulate schemes to clean up the oceans and cease diverting waterways.

The battle should be fought over water not air…….but there’s nothing in it for opportunistic political arseholes like Chris Huhne and Caroline Lucas, MSM wankers at the BBC and Grauniad and lastly opportunistic academics in the States and East Anglia plus that fucking shameless Indian geezer.

Band-wagon jumping Cameron is a disgrace too.
Martin Wyatt says:May 15, 2011 at 4:22 pmI am a scientist and an engineer.
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about – why does that not cause you to pause and think – or does your pay cheque require yiu to simply say outlandish things to get attention?

The effect of CO2 on the atmosphere is very basic physics and has been known for over 100 years. 98% of all serious scientists agree on the seriousness of the situation we face. The 2% who don’t are left squabbling if it is serious / very serious / terminal.

Do you have children? do you feel no responsibility for them?

You can find any mount of rubbish on the internet to justify ‘climate change denial’ – don’t believe any of it unless you can quote me some serious science from a leading climatologist / physacist (and one not paid for by a lobby grour) – do you think this is all just a joke or that all scientists are wrong or that it is some great socilist conspiracy – grow up!

To put cost ahead of survival is unconchionable – yes I am cross, journalsits have great power – they should use it with responsibility.
James Delingpole says:May 15, 2011 at 7:50 pmYou’re an engineer, you say, Martin? You’ll forgive my scepticism. It’s just that almost every engineer I’ve ever met takes a diametrically opposite position on AGW from the one you’ve taken. Including Prof Michael Kelly, Prince Philip Professor of Technology at Cambridge, whom I bumped into last week. Why? Well, engineers tend to work in the realm of the practical. If they make mistakes, people die. If they run over budget, clients scream. That’s why they – most of them: you seem to be the exception – tend to be so sceptical of AGW. Nobody out there, not even sceptics – believe it or not – disputes the “basic physics” of the greenhouse effect. But even if you were to double atmospheric CO2 the forcing effect on global temperatures has been estimated at 1 degree C. Not scary. Not when you think you getter a bigger av temperature rise travelling from Newcastle to Newquay. But why am I telling you this? You haven’t done your homework. You haven’t read round the subject. You haven’t even taken the trouble to apprise yourself of the – widely available, much written about – explanation as to why your “98 per cent/ 2 per cent” (though actually it’s 97 per cent 3 per cent) factoid is based on a survey skewed to the point of utter meaningless. If your half-baked analysis of my article were an engineering project, the bridge would have fallen down, hundreds would have died and you’d have lost your job. Please, next time you’re going to make intemperate comments on an article you’ve barely digested and clearly failed to understand, do your homework first.
JimmyGiro says:May 16, 2011 at 12:03 amIf it’s true that more than 95% of all ’scientists’ believe in AGW, why do climatologists make such a big deal of peer review? After all, if they know it already, then why even publish?
And why do all these ’scientists’ still think it’s a science issue, rather than an economic one? It seems that the uncertainty of climate predictions is inversely proportional to the hundreds of billions of Euro, calculated by European bean counters, that we the people are worth screwing for.
Martin Wyatt says:May 16, 2011 at 9:14 amI am an engineer – don’t just use your position to insult me.
You are simply wrong – none of the ‘facts’ you quote are facts they are ‘assertions’ – you of course did not answer a single point I raised – just gave the usual guff.

Go ask the government chief scientist, the previous chief scientist, the chief scientist of DECC or DeFRA – ask the president of the Royal Society – you are a clever ascerbic writer and no doubt this all gets you even more coverage from the nutty, ill informed conspiracy theorists everywhere. We ignore peer reviewed science at our peril – if we are to govern by emotion and tribal politics and not by logic and mature consideration of the facts we will indeed end up in a serious mess.

OOps – I have done it again – allowed myself to be wound up by your deliberate, stock in trade invective. More fool me.
Martin Wyatt says:May 16, 2011 at 9:33 amPS I know Michael Kelly and whilst you of course name drop you dont say what he said – He certainly does not agree with your position – perhaps you could ask him to drop me a note of his conversation or refer me to one of his published works on this matter which backs up your position?
PPS can you give me a link to your assertion re the 97/3 split being ’skewed beyond the point of utter meaningless’ (come on – get off the fence – what lies beyond uttter meaningless?)

Actually the 98/2 split was a result of a peer review poll of the views of the top 100 climate scientists worldwide – it was covered in New Scientist – I assume not on your reading list – not the 97/3 you disparagingly refer to – to quote yourself ‘do your homework first’
Nige Cook says:May 16, 2011 at 6:42 pm“The effect of CO2 on the atmosphere is very basic physics and has been known for over 100 years.”
– Martin Wyatt

The “greenhouse effect” is a falsehood since we don’t live in a cloudless, oceanless greenhouse; cloud cover increases with ocean temperature, which gives negative feedback, cancelling out the CO2 effect on air temp. Try Roy Spencer’s peer-reviewed data on this.
JimmyGiro says:May 16, 2011 at 7:20 pmMartin Wyatt (the scientist and engineer) wrote:
“Actually the 98/2 split was a result of a peer review poll of the views of the top 100 climate scientists worldwide”

If you performed a ‘peer review poll’ of 100 priests, you may discover a small percentage of atheists, and a larger percentage of believers in god.

Will such a survey prove the existence of god, or merely demonstrate that most priests believe in a deity?
Nige Cook says:May 17, 2011 at 9:14 amFeynman’s anti-peer review definition of science, which I used to quote at the top of my domain, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”, is now quoted at the beginning of a UK parliamentary discussion of peer-review by Donald W Braben (Department of Earth Sciences, University College London, 2 March 2011):
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmsctech/writev/856/m18.htm

Written evidence submitted by Donald W Braben (PR 18)

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”, Richard Feynman, US Nobel Prize winner, 1966.

Summary: Peer review is widely acclaimed as “the gold standard” for evaluating research proposals and papers for publication but it has serious flaws. It has a wide range of uses, all inter-related, and none should be considered in isolation. Peer review:

· Is used more intensively by the UK than almost any other nation

· Is based on opinion and consensus

· Is usually anonymously and secretly applied

· Has the power of veto

· Constrains scientific freedom

· Leads to concentration on well-defined fields

· Favours nations with the highest investments in research

· Fails the “Planck Test” (see paragraph 23)

The AGW problem is just a repetition of “so many people can’t all be wrong”. If so many people can’t all be wrong, then clearly there are no political parties, no wars, no disagreements, no alternative ideas. We all think the same way. That’s the message of “peer”-review. You’re assuming that “peers” exist. Peers only exist if you’re part of a groupthink religion of consensus to begin with. You can’t ever have a “peer” if you’re unfashionable. How can that every be true if anyone ever has anything new to say? How can any fact ever be discovered and published if it first has to have support from bigoted “peers”? More important still is the fact that genuine criticisms from outside the box are never born as fully-developed rivals but are vulnerable babies in need of care, assistance, and nurture until they mature into fully-developed rivals. As Michael Faraday said when someone sneered at electricity in its infancy, “what use is a new born baby?” It’s even more important with theories. The AGW lobby’s approach is that of King Herod: kill off funding threats before they mature.
Orentago says:May 17, 2011 at 12:35 pmJames,
Another engineer here to add to your list here of “climate change believers”. And I’m a chemical engineer. The worst kind of engineer. The kind that traditionally goes round finding oil, coal and gas, and then encouraging people to burn as much as possible. Additionally, Steve Koonin, previously BP’s chief scientist, i.e. a man that worked for a company that makes its money by encouraging people to produce CO2, agrees that climate change is due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Even Exxon Mobil are now stating that they believe our CO2 emissions are a cause for concern, and they have a reputation for funding climate sceptics!

You are in no position to claim that you have read around the subject when you yourself have claimed that you’ve never read any of the peer reviewed material! This whole refutation of anthropogenic climate change is because you are scared. You don’t want to admit that it is happening because that would mean you actually have to alter your lifestyle. I’d actually respect you more if you said “yeah, climate change is our fault, and I don’t give a shit, I rather like killing foxes, burning oil and generally being irresponsible.”

Yours facetiously,

Orentago

P.S. “But even if you were to double atmospheric CO2 the forcing effect on global temperatures has been estimated at 1 degree C. Not scary.” This is the average increase, and if you had any basic grasp of statistics and the normal/Gaussian distribution, then you’d know that a 1 degree shift would cause a substantial increase in the number of high-temperature weather events. But you haven’t, because you haven’t read around the subject. Since you like “peer-to-peer” material so much, I suggest you look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution
Orentago says:May 17, 2011 at 12:46 pm“Daddy, what do you do for a living?”
“Well son/daughter I spread fallacious rumours about the future of our planet, your future planet, and try to make people very angry. When they argue against me, instead of engaging them in mature, sensible debate I make sarcastic rude comments that in no way support my original argument.”

“Oh…”
James Delingpole says:May 17, 2011 at 2:52 pm@Matthew Spraggs: From your debut blog “I’ve never blogged before, at least not publicly, so at the moment this is a bit of an experiment.”
Don’t give up the day job, matey.
Orentago says:May 17, 2011 at 5:44 pmWasn’t really the plan. And thanks for proving my point further . Have a good one!
Nige Cook says:May 17, 2011 at 9:04 pmOrentago, if you like wikipedia, see the obfuscation of its discussion of the feedback mechanisms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming#Feedback
No mention that the whole basis for all the IPCC ~3C warming forecasts for 2100AD is not CO2 but H2O vapour assumed to evaporate and amplify (positive feedback) the much smaller CO2 effect!

No mention that NOAA data from 1948 indicate negative feedback, with (a fall by about 1% in integrated column water vapour in clear skies).

No mention of Spencer’s peer-reviewed paper showing strong negative feedback from cloud cover increases after heating of the ocean (which covers 71% of the Earth, unlike a “greenhouse”).

No inclusion of the buoyancy of sunlight absorbing humid air which rises to form clouds that shade and thus cool the surface and the air below, providing homeostasis which compensates for CO2 emissions!

No mention that the tree ring temperature data is fake since tree growth isn’t a pure function of air temp but depends on cloud cover and rain!

No mention that the satellite temperature rise data is fake since it fails to survey surface air temperatures under cloud cover, where negative feedback occurs!

See the negative feedback in the analysis of the 15 strongest tropical intraseasonal oscillations: Roy Spencer et al., Figure 4 of Spencer, et al., “Cloud and Radiation Budget Changes Associated with Tropical Intraseasonal Oscillations,” Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 34, August 9, 2007.

For every 1C warming of the ocean, the cloud cover increase was enough to cause a fall in solar radiation at the surface of 6.5 watts per square metre.

The 1 C temperature rise itself was only due to a solar radiation rise of 3.3 watts per square metre, thus strong negative feedback was caused, i.e. if you cause a small temperature rise by say adding CO2, the negative feedback from increased cloud cover will be enough to more than cancel out the effect of CO2!

The Emperor’s New Clothes are not very impressive, but it’s startling how many people are resistant to facts they don’t want to hear about. I vote that Delingpole should include a chapter on negative feedback in his next book.
Orentago says:May 17, 2011 at 10:38 pm“Orentago, if you like wikipedia, see the obfuscation of its discussion of the feedback mechanisms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming#Feedback”
Yes, clearly obfuscation, given there’s an entire article devoted to the subject detailing most of the topics you’ve covered, and many of the individual topics have their own articles and are classed under positive feedback. Hmm…

“No mention that the tree ring temperature data is fake since tree growth isn’t a pure function of air temp but depends on cloud cover and rain!”

I’m no expert, but I hear they also measured the oxygen isotopes present in ice cores to determine historic temperature changes, which are independent of rain and cloud cover. Also the tree ring data isn’t fake, it’s invalid. Fake means it never existed, which it clearly did because the trees are there.

You go on and on about how feedback counteracts the presence of CO2, but looking at prehistoric temperature and CO2 data shows a strong connection between CO2 levels and temperature. If there was such a high degree of damping, one wouldn’t expect such a close relationship.

If there were so many negative feedback effects in the climate system, it would be very very very stable. Such stability is rarely encountered in nature. Look at the weather. Look at the complexity of a food web and the drastic shifts that occur if one species’ population decreases dramatically.
Nige Cook says:May 18, 2011 at 8:20 amThere’s no discussion of H2O negative feedback there at all on that page. H2O is assumed to produce negative feedback in 100% of the ubiquous IPCC models, because it’s a powerful greenhouse gas, 30 times stronger than CO2 in gaseous form.
No mention anywhere there that H2O has fallen by 1% since 1948 (NOAA data), equivalent to a 30% fall in CO2, which is enough to more than compensate for the measured 25% rise in atmospheric CO2 since 1948!

No mention of Spencer’s published, peer-reviewed result from 15 weather oscillations that the ocean evaporation due to warm air causes negative feedback, because the moist air rises and condenses into cloud cover (instead of staying put at sea level and simply heating the air further without rising, which is the nonsense believed by 100% of IPCC models, which all assume positive feedback from H2O evaporation).

It’s fakery to pretend tree ring data indicate air temperature, when cloud cover and global dimming effects are a more important contributor to changes in the rate of tree growth.

Even Phil Jones admitted (in January’s BBC Horizon pro-AGW propaganda movie) that since 1960, it’s not been possible to correlate tree ring growth with temperature. Where Jones goes wrong is in not investigating why the tree ring growth is slower after 1960; it’s because of global dimming due mainly to increased cloud cover.

If there were so many negative feedback effects in the climate system, it would be very very very stable.

No, because the earth rotates and 71% of the Earth is ocean and 29% is land; negative feedback is due to evaporation of water from warmed surface waters (only the top 50-100 metres mixed layer of the ocean is warmed, extending down to the thermocline depth). The constant change in the areas being irradiated with sunlight as the earth rotates, and the effect of dry soil areas where there is no negative feedback, produce instabilities. CO2 will cause very slight warming in dry land areas, where there is little water to evaporate and thus little positive or negative feedback from H2O unless clouds are blown overhead from ocean areas. Over and nearer to oceans, get more negative feedback from cloud cover.
Orentago says:May 18, 2011 at 7:20 pm“No mention anywhere there that H2O has fallen by 1% since 1948 (NOAA data), equivalent to a 30% fall in CO2, which is enough to more than compensate for the measured 25% rise in atmospheric CO2 since 1948!”
Right. First of all you claim that H2O creates negative feedback, then you say the 1% decrease offsets the CO2 increase. Make your mind up!

Anyway these are relative statistics that give no indication of the quantities involved. Additionally I present you with this: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1993/93GL02935.shtml. Steady atmospheric H2O increase of 1% per year for the past half century. Anyway let’s ignore that for a moment and get back to your figures.

I’ve done a little digging around myself and present you with the following back of an envelope calculation:

Mass of Earth atmosphere: 5.14*10^18 kg
Current mass fraction of water in upper stratosphere: 0.000373%
Current mass fraction of CO2 in atmosphere: 0.0577%
From these we get current masses of H2O and CO2 as 1.92*10^13 kg and 2.97*10^15 kg respectively. Using your figures the changes from 1948, I can calculate a decrease in water vapour of 1.94*10^11 kg (corresponding to 5.81*10^12 kg of CO2) and an increase in CO2 of… drum roll please… 5.94*10^14 kg! So a net increase in GHGs of 5.88*10^14 kg of CO2 equivilent GHGs. Why stop there? I mean the global warming potential of methane is 21 and for nitrous oxide it’s 300. Perhaps I’ll leave you to do the numbers on those and we’ll see if you get it right this time.

For someone with a thorough understanding of quantum field theory (hence group theory, complex analysis etc etc) you don’t seem to grasp numbers very well. Don’t worry, I won’t be buying the book .
Nige Cook says:May 18, 2011 at 7:30 pmH2O vapour (not water droplets) causes positive feedback because water molecules absorb infrared radiation very effectively. H2O in condensed droplet form causes negative feedback, due to scattering sunlight back into space and hence cooling the surface below (each water droplet acts as a reflector, which does not happen for water molecules in vapour form).
Your “calculation” based on stratospheric H2O content is bull, because most of the water isn’t in the stratosphere but is at low altitudes, and in any case heating in the stratosphere has no effect on surface air temperatures. Hot air rises buoyantly, so it doesn’t mix downward.
Nige Cook says:May 18, 2011 at 7:37 pmFor the reliable NOAA data set showing a 1% fall in total atmospheric column H2O vapour content (not just stratospheric moisture) since 1948, equivalent to a 30% fall in CO2, see page 58 of the presentation by climatologist Dr Miklós Zágoni: http://nige.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/the-saturated-greenhouse-effect-theory-of-ferenc-miskolczi.pdf The addition of CO2 has increases the cloud cover H2O (negative feedback) at the expense of H2O vapour, which has simply warmed and risen to form cloud.
Orentago says:May 18, 2011 at 8:07 pm*Sighs.* It’s not equivalent because you haven’t used exact quantities. Anyway it’s pointless arguing with you. From what I gather you annoyed a lot of people on physicsforums.com a few years ago with your lack of understanding of basic principles.
Best of luck with the book etc anyway.
Nige Cook says:May 19, 2011 at 10:22 amI’m not arguing over “exact quantities” in this subject because of the variability; we’re dealing not with measurements and with qualitative understanding. Understanding “basic principles” is not the same thing as taking them for dogma. As I’ve explained elsewhere, everybody falsely assumes the Pauli-Fierz assumption of spin-2 for gravitons is a proved fact. What’s happened with superstring theory dogma is precisely analogous to what’s happened with AGW dogma, which is a repition of the great phlogiston, caloric, mechanical aether, Piltdown Man, and other scams.
Educational pundits have confused the consensus of expert opinion with fact. The whole reason why these scams persist is that they don’t rely purely on strong leadership. They have massive number of acolytes who are liars behind them. The dirty little secret of the Nazi regime was that Hitler told millions what they wanted to hear about eugenics, and they wanted to believe it. The first rule of marketing is to tell people what they want to believe, not what the facts really are, which is usually less inspiring.

Let’s assume that AGW is a complete lie. Who will profit? How will it cement Guardian reading intellectuals together into a marvellous new version of Marxist revolutionism? These people want to do bad things for a good objective, “the ends justify the means”. This is precisely the eugenics argument behind WWII. Any critic of eugenics was not to be argued with, but dismissed as someone who failed to understand the basic principles of the subject. It might well be pointless for you to argue with me because you’re simply deliberately self-deluded.
Orentago says:May 19, 2011 at 3:38 pmRight… We have a conspiracy theorist in our midst… Next you’ll be claiming the Earth is flat and we never went to the moon. Besides, I haven’t heard anyone describe superstrings as proved. It’s still hypothesis. Unfortunately progress in theory is currently outstripping progress in experiment as we simply can’t get the energies to test the theory thoroughly. As for gravitons, I gather the current trend goes something like “IF they exist, they can only have spin 2″, based on the rank 2 stress-energy tensor in GR. Neither of these things are dogma and are still open to scrutiny.
With regards to quantities it IS important. For example, your 30% reduction mitigating the 25% rise thing. If the 30% reduction correlated with a relatively small amount of water being removed, and yet the 25% rise correlated with a large volume of CO2 (hypothetically speaking), then you can’t really say one will cancel out the other.

Yes it’s just like the Third Reich: note that in this case however there’s no Brown Shirts, no Night of the Long Knives, no SS, no rallying cries for a new world order, no Gestapo, no mysterious disappearances etc etc (or analogous things).

I fail to see much distinction between consensus and fact. Of course if you want to get metaphysical then you can argue there are no facts. Leaving this aside and taking fact to mean anything that is almost certainly true, I fail to see the difference between consensus and fact. There’s a general consensus that the world is roughly spherical, that it goes round the Sun, that germs cause disease, the list goes on. Point is that if you can show that there is some statistical significance in your data and provide a plausible explanation for the observed correlation, and no on can find fault with your method or analysis etc (the consensus part) then the best you can do is accept the correlation and the hypothesis as being fact (“whatever is left, however implausible…” etc). Part of it becoming “fact” requires consensus!

Of course there are going to be paradigm shifts now and then that challenge everything: Copernicus and Galileo, Pasteur, Einstein, Schrödinger et al, Lorenz, the list is long, but you get the idea. Heuristically, these shifts have always involved a dramatic change in perspective. The current challenges to various theories: climate change, MMR vaccines, AIDS and more are nowhere near as radical, and are more nitpicking over details. Facts and consensus may change because new areas are explored and new boundaries are crossed, not because someone picked a hole in someone else’s paper: that’s how theories are refuted, not accepted.

In short, we stand on the shoulders of giants, we don’t go around treading on their toes. Newton’s work, in spite of Einstein, for example, gives us accurate predictions on day-to-day mass and length scales (let’s leave Mercury out for the moment).

Think I’ve made my point as best I can. Look forwards to your response.
Nige Cook says:May 19, 2011 at 7:16 pm“For example, your 30% reduction mitigating the 25% rise thing. If the 30% reduction correlated with a relatively small amount of water being removed, and yet the 25% rise correlated with a large volume of CO2 (hypothetically speaking), then you can’t really say one will cancel out the other.”
Look at the facts: the NOAA graph shows a large amount of fluctuation in water vapour since 1948, but overall the linear trend is a decrease by about 1% over 60 years. This is not an “exact” number when you take account of fluctuations from one year to the next; but the key point is that it falsifies the simple notion of positive feedback. Even if the “exact” amount of negative feedback contains uncertainties, at least the NOAA data do not support any of the positive feedback from water vapour since 1948. In order for positive feedback to occur, there must be an increase in water vapour as CO2 emissions rise. Seeing that most of the ~3C predicted IPCC temperature rises for 2100 AD is assumed to be postiive feedback from water vapour, where the hell is the evidence? The data show the opposite.

“As for gravitons, I gather the current trend goes something like “IF they exist, they can only have spin 2″, based on the rank 2 stress-energy tensor in GR. Neither of these things are dogma and are still open to scrutiny.”

Wrong, the string theorists who are used for peer-review insist on spin-2 gravitons as dogma because string theory’s main selling point is incorporating a spin-2 graviton mode. I go into the rank-2 (2nd order differential equation) issue here: http://nige.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/woit-and-the-spin-2-graviton-lie-of-pauli-and-fierz/ Basically, GR uses rank-2 equations because it describes forces in terms of spacetime curvature (2nd order differential equation), but Maxwell’s field equations are 1st order and satisfied by spin-1 field quanta. Assuming the simplest possible exchange of field quanta, a purely attractive gravitational field would imply spin-2 gravitons. However, as I pointed out in 1996, you can get repulsive gravity using spin-1 gravitons to do the job of gravitation plus cosmological repulsion (acceleration), which predicted dark energy accurately ahead of its observational discovery. Dr Campbell and Dr Zemelis rejected my paper on 25 Nov 96 predicting the dark energy and a~Hc acceleration because of string theory (spin 2 dogma), as did the editor of QCG after sending my paper for peer-review, and also the editor of PRL. The rank-2 argument is trash because it’s just one mathematical model; you can use rank-1 Maxwell type field lines instead of spacetime curvature to describe gravitation instead of rank-2 tensors. Rank-1 equations are just 1st order gradients (divs and curls). Alternatively, you can remold Maxwell’s equations into rank-2 spacetime curvatures with no rank-1 divs and curls. Thus it’s possible to model a field by different ranks of differential equations, so it’s untrue that spin-1 photons imply rank-1 field equations and rank-2 equations imply spin-2 gravitons. Ignoring this to hype string theory spin-2 groupthink is unphysical obfuscation. However, we can expect “shoot the messenger” politics here.

“Yes it’s just like the Third Reich: note that in this case however there’s no Brown Shirts, no Night of the Long Knives, no SS, no rallying cries for a new world order, no Gestapo, no mysterious disappearances etc etc (or analogous things).”

By the time we see the Fourth Reich Nazis herding us into concentration camps, it will be too late. Eugenics preceded Hitler and inspired Hitler. If eugenics “science” had been ridiculed earlier, much of Hitler’spower base and evil would have been undermined before it began. The problem with “Godwin” arguments is that they suppose the evil of the Nazis was apparent to all and sundry before WWII began, and it is “obvious” when a science is a danger. Not so. AGW has not found its Hitler yet, but it’s well into the eugenics “science” dictatorship already. I’m not against AGW as a theory, just against it being lying used as “peer-reviewed” or “consensus science” by politicians bent on creating a new world order. There are two kinds of science: (1) the groupthink stuff designed to churn out papers, suck in research grants, and (2) the more unfashionable stuff which is needed to probe for errors, omissions, contradictions, etc.

“I fail to see much distinction between consensus and fact.”

A proved mathematical theorem or experimental or observational data point with estimated error limits is a “fact” until or unless an error is found in it. A consensus of opinion is unfounded upon fact, or is founded upon alleged fact which is provably wrong.

E.g., CO2 emissions on earth warm the planet like CO2 pumped into a greenhouse. This is incorrect because 71% of the earth is water, and sky is high enough to allow evaporated water to rise to form increased cloud cover. To take an absurd exaggeration to see the physical mechanism, suppose the oceans start boiling. Very soon you’d get clouds of steam over the entire oceans and beyond, which would shadow the surface and cause cooling of the surface (negative feedback). This mechanism still works in a scaled down way for more moderate oceanic temperature rises due to CO2, and this mechanism doesn’t exist in the case of a greenhouse. Do any of the IPCC climate models include such negative feedback? No. They all assume that sunlight warmed moist air stays as heat-absorbing water vapour and doesn’t rise to form light-reflecting cloud cover. That’s not a fact. It’s a wrong consensus.

Galileo said 400 years ago: “I find it absurd to explain natural phenomena by false causes.” His words today ring true for the entire AGW liars enterprise.
Nige Cook says:May 19, 2011 at 7:29 pm(As the Galileo quotation implies, even he found that he had to cross swords with critics. The solar system had been proposed by Aristarchus of Samos in 250 BC, get his arguments convinced nobody and were “refuted” by Ptolemy in his textbook of earth-centred-universe dogma in 150 AD. Ptolemy specifically claims that solar system models are wrong because the earth would have to spin around daily, which he claims would – by Aristotle’s laws of physics – cause problems at the equator which would rotate at 1000 mph, causing 1000 mph winds and cloud motion, which are not observed.
This we have a compound problem where a false theory can be fiddled to meet the facts and can be defended by dismissing as false the correct theory, doing this by using false arguments. Newton’s laws of motion were needed to answer Ptolemy’s 150 AD criticisms of solar system theory, and they were only published in 1687, long after Copernicus’ rebirth of the solar system in 1500. So it an historical fact that you can put forward a correct theory and be “ridiculed” for being wrong, if your opponents use laws that are wrong.)
Orentago says:May 19, 2011 at 8:41 pmIf you’re taking fact to mean that then the only fact is that I think (Descartes) and any discussion pretty much becomes meaningless.
We’re clearly never going to agree on this. So I’ll try to live more sustainably and you can go and write your book and we can reconvene in 40 years and see what’s happened.
Nige Cook says:May 20, 2011 at 10:55 amFact: there is negative feedback evidence. See Spencer’s presentation http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/documents/2009/110117spencer/ndx_spencer.pdf
“We’re clearly never going to agree on this. So I’ll try to live more sustainably and you can go and write your book and we can reconvene in 40 years and see what’s happened.”

We’re not even going to agree that facts exist, since you won’t face them. There’s no greenhouse effect if you’re living in the real world where clouds form from evaporated ocean water when the temperature starts rising a bit due to CO2. I’ve always lived sustainably anyway, cycling and running wherever possible. It’s kinda fascinating to see the paranoid and morally superior “ends justify the means” justification for believing in pseudoscience and vilifying as immoral anyone who doesn’t share your dogmatic belief in the absence of facts. To you science is a political consensus of expert opinion. In that case, why not abolish laboratories altogether and decide on all cancer treatments and all knowledge by political processes? If factsdon’t exist, you can save a lot of money searching for them, and spend it instead lining the pockets of carbon credit traders.

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UEA: The Sweet Smell of Napalm in the Morning…

napalm1-460

I wasn’t going to crow, really I wasn’t. But I’m afraid I can’t resist, especially since it’s my last blog post for a while and this is an event of some significance. I’m talking about the Press Complaints Commission’s ruling on a complaint brought against this blog by our old friends at the University of East Anglia. They lost. We won. (And I do mean we: I’m hugely grateful to my legal advisers, as well as to experts including Steve McIntyre, Andrew Montford, Richard North and Christopher Booker.)

Because I’m about to dash off to Devon for some vital surfing R & R, I’ve only time to sketch in why this matters so much. Basically the UEA were trying to use the PCC as a way of gagging this blog from speaking unpalatable truths about the shoddy goings-on in its notorious Climatic Research Unit.

To its enormous credit the PCC stuck up for fair comment and freedom of speech. This is a massive victory not just for me and Telegraph blogs, but for bloggers everywhere especially those doughty souls around the world who are battling against Establishment lies, bullying and cover ups to try to reveal the truth about the corrupt, mendacious Climate Change industry.

If it sounds like I’m overdoing it, consider this: the PCC’s ruling must be among the first by any quasi-official body anywhere in the world to take the side of a Climate Change sceptic rather than that of the Warmist establishment. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Now that ruling in full:

Commission’s decision in the case of
University of East Anglia v The Daily Telegraph

The complainants, acting on behalf of the University of East Anglia (UEA), complained that three blog posts by James Delingpole were inaccurate and misleading and contained distorted information in breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code. In particular, the complainants were concerned that the blog posts described Professor Phil Jones as “disgraced, FOI-breaching, email-deleting, scientific-method abusing”. They explained that Professor Phil Jones had been exonerated of any dishonesty or scientific malpractice by a series of reviews. They were concerned that a second blog post repeated accusations that had been demonstrated as untrue, concluding that the University’s scientists were “untrustworthy, unreliable and entirely unfit to write the kind of reports on which governments around the world make their economic and environmental decisions”, and a third blog post referred to the scientists’ work as “shoddy” and “mendacious”.

The Commission emphasised that the articles in question were blog posts and were clearly identifiable as such to readers generally, as they were posited in the ‘Telegraph Blogs’ section of the website and written under the columnist’s prominent by-line. The Commission was satisfied that readers would be aware that the comments therein represented the columnist’s own robust views of the matters in question. Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code permits the publication of such comment provided it is clearly distinguished from fact and does not contain significantly inaccurate, misleading or distorted information. The Commission has previously ruled [North v The Guardian] that “In the realm of blogging (especially in cases touching upon controversial topics such as climate change), there is likely to be strong and fervent disagreement, with writers making use of emotive terms and strident rhetoric. This is a necessary consequence of free speech. The Commission felt that it should be slow to intervene in this, unless there is evidence of factual inaccuracy or misleading statement.”

Through its correspondence the newspaper had provided some evidence in support of the statements under dispute, and the columnist had included some of this evidence in the second blog post under discussion. In relation to the columnist’s description of Professor Jones as “FOI-breaching, email-deleting”, the newspaper had provided extracts from an email from Professor Jones in which he had written “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone”, and another email in which he had written “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?”. With respect to the columnist’s assertion that Professor Jones was “scientific method-abusing”, the newspaper had provided an extract from an email from Professor Jones in which he had written “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline”. In view of this, the Commission considered that there were some grounds for the columnist’s opinion – which readers would recognise was subjective – on these points.

The complainants emphasised that Professor Phil Jones and the other scientists discussed in the blog post had been cleared by a number of independent reviews. The Commission noted that the columnist had referred to these reviews, and that readers would therefore have been aware that they had taken place. In the first blog post complained of the columnist had referred to “unconvincing attempts to clear the Climategate scientists”, and noted that one scientist, Mike Hulme, had “managed to emerge from the Climategate scandal smelling of violets”. He had also noted in the first blog post that Professor Jones had granted interviews “presenting himself as a man far more sinned against than sinning”. The columnist in the second blog post complained of had expanded on his comments and made clear that the scientists had “apparently… been ‘exonerated and cleared of all malpractice by a series of independent reviews’”, although he made clear that he did not consider these reviews to have been “independent”, citing a report by Andrew Montford which was critical of the reviews. While the complainants had expressed concern that the Montford report was “partisan”, the Commission considered that the columnist was entitled to agree with the report.

The Commission was satisfied that readers would be aware of the context of the columnist’s robust views – clearly recognisable as his subjective opinion – that the scientists were “untrustworthy, unreliable and entirely unfit to write the kind of reports on which governments around the world make their economic and environmental decisions”, and that their work was “shoddy” and “mendacious”. In the circumstances, it did not consider that there had been a breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code.

The Commission noted that the newspaper had offered the complainants an opportunity to respond on the blog post. It considered that this would inform readers of the full context of the dispute and the complainants’ position. The Commission welcomed this offer, and hoped it would remain open to the complainants.

3 thoughts on “UEA: the sweet smell of napalm in the morning…”

A K Haart says:9th April 2011 at 4:04 pmExcellent news. Sighs of relief all round I think. People like me, supporters on the periphery, don’t always remember the professional risks you run when you take on institutions with deep pockets and tell it as it is. Thank you.
Nige Cook says:10th April 2011 at 8:19 amCongratulations James! Let’s hope someone will fund a proper study of the anti-greenhouse effect of CO2 now.
http://vixra.org/abs/1104.0013
Nathaniel Courthope says:18th April 2011 at 2:44 pmIndeed climate gate reflected poorly on those involved. But they’re not the only scientists in the world. I don’t see that the whole AGW agenda is sunk by a few idiots. Damaged, yes, but no more.
After all, your pal Ian Plimer has been pretty soundly discredited by failing to answer any of his critics. You promised us his book was going to change everything. Do you still stand by your original review of it?

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RealClimategate hits the final nail in the coffin of ‘peer review’ | James Delingpole

Cartoon by Josh

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep

them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Phil Jones to Michael Mann, Climategate emails, July 8th 2004.

If you can’t spot what’s wrong with this email, don’t worry you’re in great company. Among the numerous luminaries who can’t are environmental activist and filmmaker Rupert Murray, celebrity mathematician Simon Singh, celebrity Nobel Prizewinner Sir Paul Nurse and celebrity Guardian doctor Ben Goldacre to name but four. To each one of them I have tried on occasion to explain why the corruption of “peer-review” is the issue that matters above all else in the Climategate emails. But none of them, sadly, was bright enough to get it.

Sigh.

Let me have one more stab. Here’s how I explain “Peer review” in my forthcoming book Watermelons:

Peer review is the benchmark by which most new scientific research tends to be judged. If that research is to be taken seriously by the scientific community then it must be accepted for publication by one of a fairly small number of academic or quasi-academic journals, such as Nature, Science and Scientific American.

Peer review is not a perfect system. In the golden era of Twentieth century science it wasn’t even thought necessary: neither Watson & Crick nor Einstein were peer reviewed. But in today’s abstruse, fragmented world where the various branches of science have grown increasingly recondite and specialised, peer-review has become widely accepted as the least worst method by which quality science can be sifted from junk science.

And nowhere more so than within the climate science community. In the run-up to Climategate, one of the main weapons used by those within “the consensus” against dissenting scientists was that their various papers picking holes in AGW theory had not been “peer-reviewed” and were therefore invalid. As Phil Jones himself puts it in one of his emails:

“The peer review system is the safeguard science has adopted to stop bad science being published.”

I think that’s pretty clear, don’t you? Now let us revisit that Jones/Mann exchange in the light of this knowledge. What we see happening is the deterioration of “peer review” into something more akin to “pal review.” The “peer review” process – at least in the debased field of “climate science” – has been corrupted. No longer can it be relied on as a guide to what is true or untrue, correct or incorrect, plausible or implausible. That’s because the scientists who control the “peer review” process – as revealed by the Climategate emails – are a self-serving claque, with rather less concern for the pursuit of objective truth than for their own vested interests.

With me so far? Good. Now we can move on to an incredibly complicated story which is causing much excitement at Watts Up With That?, Climate Audit and Bishop Hill at the moment. Some are saying its as damning of the “Consensus” as Climategate. It involves two people you’ve probably never heard of – Eric Steig and Ryan O’Donnell.

Eric Steig is a member of Michael Mann’s “Hockey Team” – the group of Warmist scientists who established a website called Real Climate, initially to rebut claims by McIntyre and McKitrick that Mann’s Hockey Stick wasn’t quite up to scratch, later to stick up for the Warmist cause generally.

In 2009 Steig et al published a paper considered so important that it made the cover of Nature. (H/T Barry Woods). The paper purported to counter one of the main arguments used by sceptics to dispute “global warming”, viz “if global warming really is as catastrophic and universal as some claim, then how come Antarctica remains as stubbornly cold as it was 30 years ago?” Steig’s paper showed that contrary to earlier claims, Antarctica was in fact warming too.

Or was it? Among the sceptics who suspected the reliability of Steig’s paper were Jeff Id (of the late-lamented Air Vent site) and Ryan O’Donnell. They pointed out that the statistical methods used to show this alleged warming were based on highly dubious extrapolations of data taken from small number of stations on the Arctic peninsula and coastline. (Something similar happened recently, you’ll remember, with NASA’s dramatic “warming” that took place in the Arctic – all of it, funnily enough, in places where there were no thermometers to check the reliability of NASA’s claims).

Steig suggested that rather than argue it out on the blogs O’Donnell, Id at el should publish a paper under peer review. So that’s what they tried. And guess which person it was who was selected to review O’Donnell et al’s paper. And guess which person it was – under the pseudonym Reviewer A – who tried to thwart the paper’s progression to publication with 88 pages of comments and obfuscation ten times longer than the original paper.

Yep. You got it. The mystery peer reviewer was none other than Eric Steig. Even in the monstrously corrupt world of “climate science” this was clearly a breach of protocol. Certainly, in no other scientific discipline would a reviewer with such a clear conflict of interest be invited to review a paper whose main purpose was to criticise one he’d written himself.

Now let us allow Iapogus (the commenter at Bishop Hill from whom I filched this summary: I’m an interpreter of interpretations, me) to continue the story:

Ryan guessed that Reviewer A was Stieg early on, but still remained patient and good natured. At one point in the review process, Steig suggested that Ryan and Jeff should use an alternative statistical technique, which they then did. But then later, Steig then criticised the paper, citing the example of the same statistical technique as an issue (the one he had suggested). So Steig has laid himself open to charges of unprofessional conduct, duplicity. And that was when Ryan decided to bring all this out in the open. Meanwhile Gavin and the other members of the Team at the Real Climate (RC) blog have gone into overdrive in moderating any commenter who ask any reasonable questions about all of this. Basically this was the evidence that peer review at least in climate science is broken.

Now you could argue that I shouldn’t be reporting on stories like this. It’s one of those “How many polar bears can dance on the head of the pin?” discussions of nuances of meaning which may be of tremendous interest to the “climate science” community – both sceptics and warmists alike – but which has little traction in the outside world.

Up to a point, I’d agree with this. The AGW debate – as I repeatedly argue in this blog – is essentially a political one not a scientific one.

Unfortunately, there are still lots of people out there – the Simon Singhs, the Sir Paul Nurses, the Ben Goldacres, the Robin Inces, and their Guardianista Twitter Posses, for example – who think otherwise.

And it’s important that these people are made to realise that not only are there no sensible political or economic arguments to support their cause, but passing few scientific ones either. If the science supporting AGW theory is really as rock solid as Warmists claim, why on earth would they need to resort to the kind of corruption and dirty tricks we first saw in Climategate and are now witnessing again in RealClimategate?

Give up, guys. The game’s over.

PS One more thing. Undoubtedly one of the best things ever to happen to the (somewhat dubious and generally second-rater-friendly) field of Climate Science has been the Watts Up With That? website. Not least among its achievements is to show the way forward after the death of “peer review”. The future is “peer to peer” review, at which WUWT excels. It has become a forum for experts from all scientific disciplines to assess various aspects of climate science rigorously and without the grotesque bias we’ve unfortunately seen so often among the “consensus” scientists at the IPCC. And now WUWT has rightly been put up for the Best Science Blog in the 2011 Bloggies Awards. It deserves your support. Vote early, vote often!

Let me have… (to read more, click here)

8 thoughts on “RealClimategate hits the final nail in the coffin of ‘peer review’”

Nige Cook says:11th February 2011 at 8:18 amFearless Frank, the details make it look even worse! James isn’t covering up. You’re pulling the quotation out of context, then condemning the fact you take it out of context. The correct context James use it in was as evidence for what it states: the power politics and bigotry behind peer-review, which is as much the basis of science as cheese is chalk.The quotation of the email was not concerned with the future ultimate fate of one paper, whether published or not. It was showing censorship efforts (albeit increasingly failed) by the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia.Increased cloud cover due to the buoyancy of warm humid air caused by evaporation cancels out temperature effects from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Miskolczi’s “anti-greenhouse” effect (homeostasis mechanism), its solid evidence, and peer-review censorship of facts by a conspiracy of funded climate research scientists who risk losing everything if they admit the facts.“Plausible patterns for temperature and precipitation changes accompanying a general global warming, such as might occur due to a large increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, are presented. The patterns are determined by comparing the five warmest years in the period 1925−74 with the five coldest in this period. Temperature increases are indicated for most regions, with maximum warming over northern Asia. A few isolated regions show cooling. Precipitation changes are fairly evenly distributed between increases and decreases; the most important features being an increase over India, and decreases in central and south-central USA and over much of Europe and Russia. The latter decreases, should they occur, could have considerable agricultural impact.”
– T. M. L. Wigley, Phil Jones, and P. M. Kelly, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, “Scenario for a warm, high-CO2 world”, Nature, vol. 283 (1980), pp. 17-21.

This is the abstract of the first scientific paper I read on global warming as a teenager in the 80s, co-authored by good old Dr Phil Jones. It’s a very nice paper, with great statistics and world-map illustrations of the effects of CO2 on the global climate.

Unfortunately, it’s not what I call science. It doesn’t focus on the mechanism for CO2 effects on temperature. It takes that for granted. After that, all is downhill. Papers started appearing using tree ring growth rates as a proxy for global temperatures. Er, what about the effects of changes in the average amount of cloud cover on tree ring growth rates? The science is thus more and more perverted until there is none left, and you end up with the perverted curves being spliced together to give curves that are politically correct.

You can see where it’s going, can’t you? NASA gets a billion dollars a year for climate research and has already censored Miskolczi for threatening that income by trying to publish the facts. Now, Al Gore’s film propaganda lies have converted a majority of the “intellectually elite” politicians and public into fellow travellers of the “greenhouse effect” myth (shutting your eyes to 70% ocean cover and clouds that don’t form as a self-regulation mechanism in a greenhouse!). If James tells the facts, he gets increasing hostility merely for contradicting a “settled consensus”. Science ends once a hardened orthodoxy is in place. It already is.
Martin says:11th February 2011 at 10:21 pmNige Cooke, you should be ashamed of yourself!You are clearly old enough to know better. Pull your head ou of the sand before it is too late. The supposed “conspiracy of funded climate research scientists ” at UAE were exonerated… I suppose you would also claim that Julian Simons was correct to claim that humanity now has the “ingenuity to feed an unlimited population for the next 7 billion years”.If so, you have failed to grasp a few basic concepts: (i) The Second Law of Thermodynamics;
The concept of Entropy; (ii) The finititude of the Earth’s resources; and (iii) Exponential growth (clue: even 1% annual growth results in 2 x population in 70 years).For god’s sake, wake up and smell the coffee!
Martin Lack says:12th February 2011 at 11:52 amWhy has my previous unoffensive reply not appeared? Was it because I included the link to my website (i.e. blog)?… C’mon James, you at least believe in “free speech”, don’t you? Surely, I don’t have to tell you that censorship is a sign of insecurity and/or paranoia?
James Delingpole says:12th February 2011 at 12:08 pm@Martinlack. Ignorant jerks like yourself are generally welcome on this site, Martin. Welcome because of the informed responses they tend to generate from better-educated, more intelligent contributors like Nige Cooke. The reason your first comment wasn’t posted as quickly as you wanted was simply because I get lots of emails a day and don’t always have time to go through them all pressing the Approve Comment button.
But I do have a policy of deleting abusive emails sent anonymously because I believe this is an act of cowardice. If you wish to have your fatuous, rude comments included again please give us a forwarding address/website where we may contact you.
Thanks.
Nige Cook says:12th February 2011 at 10:04 pm“Scientists have every right to complain if they are not allowed to comment on a paper. That paper was flawed and the editor of Climate Research refuse to allow peers to comment on the flaws. hence the complaint. Taking that email of out context means you and Delingpole seem to be promoting censorship within science.” – Fearless FrankThey’re not scientists. They’re doing the censorship of science. They censor all the facts out using peer-review as petty power politics. They allow no criticism of pseudo-science. What peer-review means is a conspiracy of “might is right” pseudoscience, which has been disproved time and time again. Eugenics is a good example which shouldn’t have been backed by “scientists” like Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrel who wrote a best-seller on the benefits of Nazis “science” in 1935: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man,_The_UnknownCarrel didn’t know about evolution requiring diversity. Natural climate change deniers like yourself have no idea that we’re still coming out of an ice age. Just like the Carrel, you have no idea about evolution replacing creationism. You think humans are unnatural, when in fact humans are just as much a product of evolution as plants or insects. What humans do is a part of nature. In any case, CO2 drives only cloud cover, not temperature because H2O that is evaporated rises to form clouds: injecting more CO2 has a negative feedback from H2O cloud cover that cancels out the infrared absorption by CO2.But it’s a waste of time repeating the facts because you’re unwilling to be reasonable and listen. You demand you’re right unless I publish in your “peer”-reviewed journal when you’re not a “peer” but a biased quack. What you have to remember, though, is that the more crackpot Al Gore’s followers like yourself become, the more obvious it becomes to the wider public that science is being perverted for political ends, such as Nobel Prizes. I’m 100% certain that medical Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrel would have received the “Nobel Peace Prize” like Al Gore if the Nazis had won WWII and doctored the Nobel Committee. It’s a shame it’s already been self-doctored in peacetime! However, “angel” Nobel was a warmonger who supplied explosives to BOTH sides in the Crimean War bloodbath…
Al Gore thinks he will be dead before “AGW” is dead, but he might be wrong, and you too.

“If so, you have failed to grasp a few basic concepts: (i) The Second Law of Thermodynamics; The concept of Entropy; (ii) The finititude of the Earth’s resources; and (iii) Exponential growth (clue: even 1% annual growth results in 2 x population in 70 years).” – Martin

Martin, you don’t appreciate that the H2O in the earth’s atmosphere (where clouds form, unlike a greenhouse) cancels out the greenhouse effect from CO2.

First, consider the basis for the anti-greenhouse effect of evaporated water due to an initial temperature rise from CO2. On average, today:

3% of incoming radiation is absorbed by greenhouse gases excluding water vapor,
15% is absorbed by water vapor,
5% is absorbed by clouds and
47% is absorbed by the earth’s surface;

while:

21% of incoming radiation is reflected back by clouds,
6% is reflected back by the air, and
3% is reflected back by the earth’s surface.

Water in the atmosphere thus absorbs a total of 20% of incoming solar radiation, and reflects back a total of 21%. So the amount of reflection by cloud cover exceeds the amount of absorption due to water vapor absorbing infra-red solar radiation. Overall, 70% of incoming solar radiation is currently absorbed, and 30% is reflected back into space.

Now calculate what happens to these numbers when a temperature rise due to CO2 increases occurs. You find that doubling today’s water content in the atmosphere – assuming that the vapor mass to cloud droplet mass ratio is a constant – reduces the total absorption from 70% to 64% of incoming radiation, while it increases reflection from 30% to 36% reflection. Hence, evaporated water has an anti-greenhouse effect: a “negative feedback”.

However, the situation is even worse than this for the IPCC fraudsters, since the atmospheric greenhouse water vapor (humidity) has allegedly not even been rising in step with the total evaporated water:

“During the 61-year period [since 1948] … the global average absolute humidity diminished about 1 per cent.” – Dr. M. Zagoni.

“You must here distinguish – especially in teaching – the science from the forms or procedures that are sometimes used in developing science. … great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers. … We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on … They are merely an imitative form of science … The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. …. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

– Richard P. Feynman, “What is Science?”, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, published in The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6, 1968, pp. 313-320.
Nige Cook says:13th February 2011 at 11:30 amFearless Frank, the “denialists” are those like Al Gore who deny we’re coming out of an ice age and deny that CO2 injections are cancelled out by increased cloud cover once the oceans warm.Soon and Baliunas are actually in the Al Gore camp. They have no idea how the sun works, they simply have no mechanism for solar output to vary randomly. The sun is an extremely stable nuclear fusion reactor producing energy in the core at 15 million Kelvin. The idea that magnetic effects like sunspots and solar storms at the surface (where the temperature is only around 6000 K) varying the gross energy output is total nonsense: energy is flowing out from the stable nuclear processes in the core has to be emitted from the surface. If you have sunspots, that just means that the rest of the surface is that bit hotter and emits the energy instead. Solar storms have no significant effect. Charged and massive radiation from the sun is mostly trapped in the Van Allen belts in space far above the atmosphere.Trying to correlate solar activity to global warming like Soon and Baliunas is the perfect example of pseudoscience. There is no mechanism, but they don’t care. It’s just like professor Ernest Sternglass in 1969 publishing “The Death of All Children”, correlating the flattening of the rate of fall of infant mortality rate after 1950 to an effect of radiation from nuclear tests, when in fact fall in infant mortality was simply due to antibiotics, and once antibiotics were introduced the fall rate naturally stabilized.Why discuss Soon and Baliunas when they don’t have a mechanism? You’re not discussing real science, just conjecture. I don’t see how Soon and Baliunas were behaving like scientists, they were behaving like politicians. If they want to emphasise scientific credentials, it must be for scientific work. Otherwise, it’s like Nurse or Carrel using their Nobel prize in science as an “authority” credential when promoting pseudoscience.
It is not possible for the sun’s output to vary significantly because the random flaring and sunspot processes we can see on the surface of the sun from magnetic field energy due to convection of charged particles, has no effect on the rate of fusion that is producing the energy in the centre of the sun at a temperature 2,500 times higher than the surface. The sun must radiate the energy it generates in a very precise, very stable equilibrium, or it would be unstable, the temperature would spiral out of control. If “cool” sunspots form, the energy normally radiated from those areas must be radiated from other areas instead.

The bottom line is that politically inspired lying “controversy” must be censored out of scientific journals, which must be kept to facts supported by mechanisms. Statistical correlations unsupported by mechanisms are pseudoscience, and the current technique towards publishing and discussing them or criticising them, just prolongs the focus of attention on pseudoscience. This is why “peer”-review is such a tragedy. Journals must in future have separate sections, one for “technician science” (incremental “stamp collecting” advances within a given mainstream theory or paradigm) and a separate section for “alternative theories” (giving space to minority ideas, but not permitting any political groupthink to allow just one “controversial” alternative theory to dominate).

People like Nurse are essentially good technician scientists (despite the Nobel prize), working in a paradigm that was founded long ago and using techniques largely invented by others. They may invent new tools and methods within the paradigm, but they are not the revolutionary founding fathers like Newton or Darwin. They’re defensive about the paradigm or theory they build upon, seeing revolutionaries are ignorant before they read their work, and relying on “peer”-reviewers to censor out critics of the foundations of their subject. This is exactly how Copernicus and Galileo were censored out. It’s obvious that many of the facts in a groupthink science will survive a future scientific revolution (unless all the data is being fiddled, which seems the case when using tree growth as a proxy for temperature alone!), so it’s mainly the interpretation of the facts that changes.

Soon and Baliunas did not confront the key scientific fact, the fact that the feedback of H2O on rising CO2 cancels out temperature changes due to the cloud cover mechanism, instead of accelerating temperature rises as the fatally flawed IPCC models claim. So there is no reason to discuss Soon and Baliunas since it is pseudoscience.

If journals start discussing pseudoscience, it will detract from the hard mechanistic science. This is precisely why Bohr and Heisenberg’s anti-relativistic 1st quantization dogma of 1927 ended physical advances in quantum mechanics, whose physical interpretation remains obscure for political not scientific reasons (1st quantization was disproved in 1929 by Dirac who introduced the simple mechanism for indeterminancy, namely physically real quantum fields creation and annihilation operators, i.e. 2nd quantization which is completely incompatible with 1st quantization despite the efforts of textbook authors to obfuscate this).
Nige Cook says:14th February 2011 at 9:42 am“The point is, the paper is flawed, and any peer review on that paper was censored.”Papers on “superstring theory” are also flawed (there is an “anthropic landscape” of 10^500 different theories, each relating to a different metastable vacuum state stabilized compactification of the assumed extra 6/7 spatial dimensions of uncheckable Planck size).Peer-review on “superstring theory” is causing a crisis in particle physics, by focussing attention on imaginary solutions, not hard real world data explanation. The best way to deal with pseudoscience is to ignore it, not enter into a lengthy “controversy” that gets no where.You can’t scientifically “disprove” something that doesn’t exist, because the proponents will always say that it is “hidden in the background noise”. You can’t “disprove” UFOs, ghosts, little green men, 6/7 dimensional superstring, supersymmetric particles with masses too high to ever detect in the world’s biggest particle accelerators, or many other speculations.
Therefore, trying to discredit pseudoscience by arguing with proponents of uncheckable guesswork is going to sink genuine science into an unending controversy which can never, even in principle, be resolved one way or another by any conceivable scientific experiment. You have to ignore uncheckable speculations unless or until someone can cme up with some kind of checkable evidence that permits scientific experiments or observations to determine whether the speculation agrees with nature, or not.
Jack Cowper says:18th February 2011 at 12:46 pmGreat article James.Roy Spencer had simular trouble with his paper – “On the diagnosis in the presence of unknown radiative forcing”. A direct quote here:http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/08/our-jgr-paper-on-feedbacks-is-published/‘After years of re-submissions and re-writes — always to accommodate a single hostile reviewer — our latest paper on feedbacks has finally been published by Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR).’
So who was the hostile reviewer in this case? Maybe it was someone else in the team!

Comments are closed.

‘Climategate scientists should be immediately beatified in preparation for full sainthood by 2011′ says latest official enquiry | James Delingpole

April 15th, 2010

Go on then. Have a guess what the latest official Climategate enquiry – headed by the rigorous, utterly unbiased, totally impartial, and fanatically unpartisan Lord Oxburgh – has decided.

Yes, that’s right. They’re all totally innocent!

“We found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention,” concludes the report, confirming what many of us have long suspected: if only Professor St Phil Jones had had proper media training in how to lie properly, lose data, and delete emails after FOI requests without being caught, none of this unspeakableness would have happened.

5 Responses to “‘Climategate scientists should be immediately beatified in preparation for full sainthood by 2011′ says latest official enquiry”

Owen Kirton says:April 15, 2010 at 2:12 pmDoesn’t this bloke Roxburgh own his own wind turbine factory?
Owen Kirton says:April 15, 2010 at 2:13 pmcorrection..Lord Oxburgh.
Mark says:April 16, 2010 at 2:42 pmThey’re all totally innocent but now the response :
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/169578/College-gives-files-of-climate-change-sceptics-to-police
Pete H says:April 17, 2010 at 4:30 amIts was a hell of a cliffhanger James! Coming after Pen Mann’s “get out of jail free card” and the Parliamentary “what decline” whitewash!Its truly a “Travesty”!
Carl C says:April 20, 2010 at 5:12 pmJames, did you even read any of the emails? Or where you happy being spoonfed a few out of context words here and there by FOX news? Still, I guess scientist bashing makes more interesting headlines than presenting science in full context.

Climategate: The Parliamentary Cover-Up

Climategate exposed the greatest scandal in the history of modern science but you’re never going to hear this from any of the official investigations. Andrew Orlowski at The Register has uncovered why.

Turns out, that there’s this well-funded SPECTRE-like advocacy group called GLOBE (Global Legislators for a Balanced Environment) International which has co-opted leading parliamentarians from the main parties in both the Commons and the Lords into advancing the AGW agenda.

One of those is Lord Oxburgh, recently appointed – on the Royal Society’s recommendation – to lead one of the two official enquiries into Climategate. Mysteriously, Lord Oxburgh has failed to mention GLOBE in his register of interests.

Orlowski reports:

GLOBE may be too obscure to merit its own Wikipedia entry, but that belies its wealth and influence. It funds meetings for parliamentarians worldwide with an interest in climate change, and prior to the Copenhagen Summit GLOBE issued guidelines (pdf) for legislators. Little expense is spared: in one year alone, one peer – Lord Michael Jay of Ewelme – enjoyed seven club class flights and hotel accommodation, at GLOBE’s expense. There’s no greater love a Parliamentarian can give to the global warming cause. And in return, Globe lists Oxburgh as one of 23 key legislators.

One insider has described Oxburgh’s appointment to lead this supposedly neutral investigation into Climategate as “like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank.” Here are just a few more of this scrupulously unbiased fellow’s interests, revealed by Orlowski:

In the House of Lords Register of Lords’ Interests, Oxburgh lists under remunerated directorships his chairmanship of Falck Renewables, and chairmanship of Blue NG, a renewable power company. (Oxburgh holds no shares in Falck Renewables, and serves as a non-exec chairman.) He also declares that he is an advisor to Climate Change Capital, to the Low Carbon Initiative, Evo-Electric, Fujitsu, and an environmental advisor to Deutsche Bank. For a year he was non-exec chairman of Shell.

GLOBE seems especially drawn to the kind of MP who likes sailing close to the wind. Its president is none other than Stephen Byers, recently exposed in the “cash for influence” scandal as offering his services as a lobbyist like a “cab for hire” for a small consideration of just £5,000 a day. And its leading lights have also included Elliott Morley, one of the MPs more heavily implicated in the Telegraph’s parliamentary expenses scandal.

As Bishop Hill notes its UK parliamentary group officers also include the redoubtable and incorruptible Labour MP Eric Joyce – “the first MP to claim more than £1m in expenses and on more than one occasion the most expensive MP in the house. He once famously claimed for three oil paintings on expenses “because they looked nice”.”

But then, to judge from the research done by Cumbrian Lad at Bishop Hill, GLOBE is very much the kind of body that likes to do things on the sly. Its Memorandum of Incorporation includes this revealing snippet about its purposes:

“To provide a forum for ideas and proposals to be floated in confidence and without the attention of an international spotlight“

Bishop Hill reports:

GLOBE’s corporate structure and funding are not clear from its website, but Cumbrian Lad has discovered that it is a private limited company. Interesting that – an organisation of legislators, run as a private company. He has also obtained copies of its accounts and other information from Companies House.
GLOBE was incorporated in 2006, the founding directors all being British legislators – Malcolm Bruce MP (LibDem), Joan Ruddock MP (Lab) and Nick Hurd (Con), with the last directorship being held by Lord Hunt. Since that time, Joan Ruddock has stood down and Lord Oxburgh and Eliot Morley MP (Lab) have been appointed to the board.

The current accounts are all abbreviated, which means there is very little detail about the income and expenditure of the company, but for some reason 2007 was filed in full, revealing an income of £820k, almost double that of the previous year, and all of which was spent on administrative expenses.

And where does this money come from? Its 2008 accounts note:

The Directors acknowledge the support of International Organisations, Governments, Parliamentary Bodies and Industry, both financially and politically, with paticular acknowledgement to United Nations, The Global Environment Facility, The World Bank, European Commission, the Governments of Canada and Great Britain, the Senate of Brazil and Globe Japan.

Bishop Hill smells a rat:

My reading of all this would be that GLOBE is a vehicle to enable legislators to avoid the scrutiny of their electorates – the date of incorporation is probably instructive, coming just after the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act.

It’s no wonder Lord Oxburgh didn’t want to mention it on his CV.

Here is the link listing the names of all the MPs in its parliamentary group. The ones I find particularly interesting are the Tories on the list. They are:

Gregory Barker
Kenneth Clarke
Lord Fowler
Charles Hendry
Nick Hurd
Graham Stuart
Tim Yeo

If any of these represent your constituency, I urge you not to vote for them. A Conservative who indulges in this kind of slippery green activism is no conservative at all.

One Response to “Climategate: the parliamentary cover-up”

Diogenes says:March 28, 2010 at 12:15 pmThanks for exposing this James. Guido Fawkes outed more of Yeo’s green investment advocacy on Newsnight some weeks back, so this reinforces it. I do hope the whitewashers’ hypocrisy will be exposed in the Telegraph. As for TV the only place we’ll see it exposed is on Putin’s pet Channel RT – the only news channel to lay into AGW. The Russians may be authoritarian, but they have better scientific debate on the issue because they have some hard-headed scientists who don’t have a nonsense-loving liberal establishment to nuture.

The case against Dr Phil ‘Climategate’ Jones | James Delingpole

January 31, 2010

Dr Phil Jones – the (suspended) head of the Prince of Wales’s favourite AGW-promotion institution the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia – had a narrow squeak the other day. Though the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found his department in breach of Freedom of Information laws (Jones and his team had deliberately withheld or conspired to destroy data), Jones was able to escape prosecution on a technicality.

Next time, he may not be so lucky. Our friend John O’Sullivan at Climategate.com has been looking closely at the Climategate emails and reckons there is still a very strong case for a criminal prosecution, which could see Dr Jones facing ten years on fraud charges.

O’Sullivan argues:

What is not being intelligently reported is that Jones is still liable as lead conspirator in the UK’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and may face prosecution under the United Kingdom Fraud Act (2006). If convicted of the offense of fraud by either false representation, failing to disclose information or fraud by abuse of his position, he stands liable to a maximum penalty of ten years imprisonment.

As to exactly what the Crown Prosecution Service’s case might be, I recommend you read O’Sullivan’s shrewd and thorough analysis.

Tag: Phil Jones

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‘Climategate scientists should be immediately beatified in preparation for full sainthood by 2011′ says latest official enquiry | James Delingpole

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Climategate: The Parliamentary Cover-Up

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