Category: Science (Page 11 of 17)

Britain’s new high commissioner, Baroness Valerie Amos, has expressed surprise that Australians are still debating whether humans cause climate change and says other nations have long since ”moved on”.

Not only have we stopped thinking, she says, but you should stop thinking too.

Maybe political leaders in other countries believe thoughtful examination of the evidence is an unneccessary inconvenience, but polls show most ordinary people, and most scientists, disagree.

Politicians who allow the media to drag them along by their snouts should not be surprised when their constituents demand an explanation for the billions of wasted dollars, the lost jobs, the suppression of industry and employment, for a scare with as much substance as the Jupiter Effect.

The more hope fades, the happier I will be.

Alas for the alarmists, ‘dark clouds are gathering over Copnhagen’ despite an apparent majority of political leaders being committed to ‘take action to tackle the threat of climate change.’

I feel more threatened by their idiotic plans to spend vast sums of money to tell the weather it is not allowed to change.

Dr Marty Herzberg has written a brief overview of the nonscience of ‘global warming science’. That link will download the article in Word format.

Number one point (in my view) – the absurdity of calling CO2, the basis of photo-synthesis, and therefore of all plant and animal life on Earth, a pollutant. 

Dr Herzberg notes that the science is very thin indeed to be the basis of such far-reaching and expensive policy decisions. So why are such policies being implemented? Who benefits?

Viv Forbes at the Carbon Sense Coalition suggests the answer is not hard to find – huge amounts of money have been spent on global warming research and bureaucracy, and if the ETS or RAT scheme is implemented, more vast amounts of money will be made.

All at the expense of ordinary tax-payers, of course.

Interesting figures here from the Pew Research Center on declining faith in the religion of global warming apocalyptic, with only 36% of those surveyed agreeing there is good evidence the world is warming because of human activity.

As Watts Up With That notes, this is about the same as the number of people who believe in haunted houses. Pity they weren’t asked the two questions at the same time – I’d be interested to see the extent of overlap.

And you might like to visit the UK Science Museum’s website to make it clear you want to be ‘counted out’ of efforts to convince the government to sacrifice jobs and industry while implementing polcies which will not change climate by one tenth of one degree, and to sign up to the Copenhagen treaty.

So far, despite the museum’s manipulative wording to try to get people to agree the science is settled, 6070 so far want to be counted out, compared with 967 wanting to be counted in.

I hope the government is listening.

Update:

As at Monday 9th November, the realists are still ahead on the museum’s vote, but the haunted house crowd are catching up. Rationalists please go and vote!

Like it or not, Tim Lambert is one of Australia’s leading left wing bloggers.

I don’t like it, because Lambert’s approach to debate is so often simply to mock or belittle  people with whom he disagrees. His ongoing vicious attacks on Professor Ian Plimer, including repeated accusations of plagiarism, are a perfect example. So while Lambert cannot be ignored, I link to him as little as possible.

His snide remarks about Janet Albrechsen’s carefully expressed concerns about the proposed Copenhagen Treaty fit the Deltoid pattern perfectly.

Instead of answering Albrechtsen’s questions by saying, for example, ‘No that’s not what this says,’ or ‘I think you have misunderstood this section,’ Lambert’s response is essentially to say, well, she’s an adiot, and so is anyone who agrees with her.

No thinking person minds their views being challenged. I would be glad to see a carefully argued leftist response to Albrechtsen and Monckton’s concerns.  But I could be waiting a long time.

The draft Copenhagen agreement can be downloaded from Watts Up With That. Andrew Bolt points out that if we sign, it commits us to handing over a minimum 0.7% of total GDP – at least $7 billion per year.

It is worth repeating Albrechtsen’s questions:

What exactly are the powers of the overseeing body to be set up by the Copenhagen Treaty?

And why has there been no media or parliamentary discussion of the Copenhagen treaty and its potential impact on a: climate (zero) and b: Australia’s economy (dire)?

I was in Adelaide yesterday to do some buying for my shop, and was interrupted in my travels about the city by about 100 scruffy-looking characters on bicycles. Some of them had painted the number 350 on their clothes and some were wearing costumes with bits of green ribbon hanging off, so they all like looked like a bunch of overgrown kindergarteners on their way home from a very bad fingerpainting and dress-up party. They were shouting about something, but I couldn’t hear what it was, and anyway, I was in a hurry to get what I needed done in time to get back to Cape Jervis to catch the last ferry home that night.

When I got home I googled 350. I was assuming the scribbles had some meaning – which of course might not have been the case. But I found this: 350.org

What a dismal, dishonest, self-important little website it is.

A ‘ring of hope’ around the White House, with a banner claiming its bearers are against pollution and poverty. They are not. They are against the use of cheap energy which has extended our life span, reduced infant mortality, and given vast numbers of people the biggest and quickest ever boost out of poverty. More like a ring of grim ignorance which would, if their policies were implemented, keep life in developing nations nasty, brutish and short.

A photo of a nibble of nerds in a burnt out piece of Victorian forest, with the entirely dishonest suggestion that those fires were the result of anthropogenic climate change.

Do any of these people read or think?

Do any of them realise there is no correlation whatever between human production of CO2 and changes in climate? Do any of them know or care that increased CO2 will reduce desertification, increase agricultural production and therefore reduce hunger, and make the world a greener place?

The Western world has been taken over by zombies.

Well maybe not. Adelaide is a city of just over a million people. If only 100 or so turned out for the world day of climate dumbness, then only 0.0001 percent of the population of Adeladie is zombies.

The problem is that zombies seem to be running the media. In Australia it is quite possible the politicians are going to do what the zombies tell them. This means implementing an appallingly stupid RAT (Ration and Tax) scheme to reduce CO2 emissions. Or rather to send CO2 emissions off-shore. That is, to send industry and employment off-shore.

As Blind Freddy could see, this will have no effect at all on climate (and wouldn’t even if the climate disaster predictions were true) but will radically increase the costs of operating Australia’s major industries and transport.

Andrew Bolt leads off after his return from holidays with a tightly written summary of the world-is-hotter-than-ever-the-hockey-stick-proves-it fraud.

There is no doubt now that it really was fraud and not simply incompetence.

The incompetence was discovered by statisticians McIntyre and McKitrick in 2003, and independently confirmed by Edward Wegman.

Now it is clear that there was not only incompetence in the handling of data, but that the data was cherry picked so egregiously there can be no serious doubt that the intention of Mann (the hockey-stick man) and Briffa and their collaborators was to deceive.

A part summary of why on climateaudit.org – essentally the result was based on recordings from just ten trees, carefully selected from over forty.

Interesting comment from a Finnish professor whose specialisations include climate change and carbon cycling:

‘When later generations learn about climate science, they will classify the beginning of 21st century as an embarrassing chapter in history of science. They will wonder our time, and use it as a warning of how the core values and criteria of science were allowed little by little to be forgotten as the actual research topic — climate change — turned into a political and social playground.’

And an example of how science has gone so badly wrong is:

‘.. a study recently published in the prestigious journal Science. It is concluded in the article that the average temperatures in the Arctic region are much higher now than at any time in the past two thousand years. The result may well be true, but the way the researchers ended up with this conclusion raises questions. Proxies have been included selectively, they have been digested, manipulated, filtered, and combined, for example, data collected from Finland in the past by my own colleagues has even been turned upside down such that the warm periods become cold and vice versa. Normally, this would be considered as a scientific forgery.’

Of course Richard Lindzen, possibly the world’s leading atmospheric phycicist, said some years ago that he believed future generations would be astonished by the panic generated by, and money spent trying to control, a perfectly natural cyclic rise of a few tenths of a degree over a century.

In related news, this year’ s Antarctic ice melt is the lowest on record since satellite measurement began, Arctic ice is thicker – under the headline ‘Scientists Predict Ice-Free Summers for Arctic’ (of course) , and another leading scientist says publicy that CO2 emissions are good for the Earth, increase productivity, and do not cause global warming.

Oh, and this weekend may see the earliest snowfalls ever recorded in Chicago, beating the previous record set three years ago. Damn that global warming.

Earliest Recorded Snowfalls in Chicago

Well, this is cool.

Elizabeth Blackburn was born in Tassie, and studied in Melbourne before completing her doctorate at Cambridge. She is now the Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Physiology at the University of California.

Her Nobel prize was awarded for her research into cell aging and regeneration, and in particular, chromosome structure, teleomeres (bits of repetitive DNA at the ends of chomosomes which Professor Blackburn says are like the tips on the ends of shoelaces to keep them unravelling) and telomerase, the enzyme which maintains them.

Well done!

But Blackburn is wrong to support embryonic stem cell research, and the cloning of human beings so that the clone’s tissue and organs can be harvested.

Not only is embryonic stem cell research a waste of money, not having  produced a single useful result (whereas other forms of stem cell research are promising), but more importantly, any culture whose members  deliberately destroy the lives of other human beings to enhance their own longevity or comfort is corrupt and immoral and will fail.