It's all over but for the sweating?

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Arragonis

So stating that Peer Review is some kind of "gold standard" is obvious woo.

Sure, it's simplistic. Consider it a shorthand for "Every part of the science gets repeatedly tested, often by engineers using the same principles in other fields. If you want to claim it doesn't, you need something a little bit better than 'I don't want it to be true, 'cause it'll upset my lifestyle,".

And we have
- People without clean water
- People without enough to eat, including kids
- A first world which doesn't seem to care because we focus on this CO2 stuff.

And at the end you ignored my key question so I'll restate it - your kids vs. their's - which ones are more deserving of resources, make a choice.

I don't have kids, so I can be perfectly neutral on these questions:

1) "People without clean water" So tell me, exactly how much of this non-clean water is in fact made not clean by the waste from fossil-fueled industry? And how is more fossil fuel use going to provide any significant amount of clean water?

And then we could get into clean air...

2) "People without enough to eat, including kids" - So again, how is continued fossil fuel use going to provide more food? Especially when one of the side effects of fossil fuel use is the ongoing degradation & destruction of productive land?

3) "A first world which doesn't seem to care because we focus on this CO2 stuff." And why do you think that? Putting aside the question of why we should care, some of us have been trying to deal with such problems for a couple of centuries. Is it our fault that the rest of the world (and a lot of the first world) just doesn't care about consequences?

As to which kids are more deserving... I think ALL kids deserve a chance at a decent life, and that's something they do not get when they're raised in a first-world urban feedlot.

[Arragonis]

Climate Science Humiliated…Earlier Model Prognoses Of Warmer Winters Now Today’s Laughingstocks

[Arragonis]

An amusing letter.

31 March 2013
Sir Paul Nurse, President, The Royal Society
6-9 Carlton House Terrace
London SW1Y 5AG

Dear Sir Paul Nurse,

Your reply to Lord Lawson dated 8 March has come to hand. It goes without saying that I make no claim to be responding on his behalf; he is more than capable of doing that for himself. Your letter, however, is such a singular juxtaposition of barely suppressed personal antipathy (malice even), blatant mendacity and shameless evasion, especially coming from a person in your position, that comment seems warranted.

Nigel Lawson’s letter never “implied that you should not be commenting on climate science” sic. Only a wilfully distorted reading of the words written could possibly have placed such a construction on them. The point of emphasis very plainly was and is that there is no excuse for wanton misrepresentation, either generally or personally. You are then provided with a specific example, which the writer unequivocally and in terms describes as “a lie”. He is, of course, quite right, is he not? And, if he is, what then are you?

You write that you ‘understand very well the importance of reliable observation, experiment and consistent rational argument’ sic. Good, and so you should! After all, to borrow Prof. Lindzen’s elegant and succinct definition, “Science is the continuing and opposing dialectic between theory and observation”. In principle, nothing in science is ever “settled”, so long the contra-scientific contention of anthropogenic global warming consensus proselytisers, conspicuously amongst them The Royal Society. Against this backdrop and of your assurance in particular, perhaps you would care then to explain why such propagandists:

decline to publish empirical evidence;
usually with insolence, refuse to offer their raw data, their algorithms and their methodology to the scrutiny of the scientific community at large;
manipulate and misrepresent the data they claim to possess;
refuse to validate or have validated their general circulation models, even though these are known to be flawed;
decline to engage in any form of debate which might expose them even to questioning, let alone to constructive criticism;
who, in substitution thereof, prefer instead to smear and defame any who challenge their dogmatic orthodoxy, with many amongst the dissenters being scientists of immense distinction, equal at least to your own, and often experts in disciplines far more directly relevant than yours to matters in hand.

With respect to the fifth of these bullet points (and there could have been many more), let me add that I speak from experience. Prior to 1 August 2007, the RS, on its website, carried a section headed “Share Your Views”. It comprised about six topics, one of which was putative climate change. On 1 August, the entire section was pulled……………. I have reason to believe because of awkward questions being posed in a number of contributions posted by myself. Now, though I say it myself, this was pretty impressive for, to be sure, here was an admittedly interested but, still, an untrained layman occasioning the demise of an entire section hitherto sanctioned and encouraged by the mighty RS! A hard copy of the complete exchanges can be supplied; would you like one?

In passing, from the RS, I personally was the recipient of this rather heart rending little bleat:

“Yes, WE have caused global warming”. And yes, in scarlet!

And you claim to respect the importance of rational debate. Well, well!

Furthermore, contrary to your baseless suggestion, at least to my knowledge, there have never been any GWPF ad hominem attacks on persons who disagree with it/them. Such, on the other hand, constitute the default tactic of, as far as can be detected, all those of your claimed persuasion. Indeed, an increasing public perception of pointless impoverishment wrought by fraudulent science has concomitantly increased the shrill desperation of its proponents, to the extent that dishonourable epithets such as ‘denier’, ‘contrarian’, ‘nay-sayer’ now stand as amongst the more moderate “personal attacks” favoured by AGW cult fundamentalists.

The impertinence implicit in your suggestion that the GWPF may not have access to climate science advice of the highest calibre is in keeping with the thrust of your letter as a whole. It is also equally wide of the mark. The distinction between their climate specialists and those favoured by the RS, however, lies in the objectivity which the former bring to the task of assessing possibly dangerous climate change in contrast, that is, to the edifying displays of integrity in, say, the climategate emails and pronouncements of the IPCC – and let’s not overlook, within only the last few days, the work of such paladins of scientific rectitude as Messrs. Marcot et al 2013 with yet another dodgy hockey stick. The allusion, I’m sure, is familiar to you.

And finally, of course, we must not neglect a (perhaps the) key suggestion in your letter, namely that relating to the issue of GWPF funding. This is now, and has ever been, the one routine constant running through all warmist rants and diatribes. That it should be repeated by the President of The Royal Society demonstrates more clearly than anything else the loss of dignity it has endured and depths of corruption to which it has been reduced under your stewardship and those of your two predecessors. At this point, be it noted also that what is sauce for the goose is likewise sauce for the gander. No? But then, in your book, hypocrisy, no doubt, is the tribute that vice must reluctantly but unavoidably render to virtue.

Well, anyway, I can provide you with at least a partial answer. In small measure some of their funding has come from me and, dare I suggest, many like me. And no, I have no connections with ‘big oil’, ‘big gas’ or the Koch brothers! I do, however, have a deep seated prejudice against bogus science, scientific charlatans, self-serving and dishonest politicians and brazen chicanery.

Yours sincerely,

R.C.E. Wyndham



Cc: Prime Minister Mr. E. Miliband MP Mr. N. Clegg MP Mr. E. Davey MP Lord Lawson As the spirit moves

PS For illumination as well as entertainment: Address of the President of the Royal Society to their Lordships of the Admiralty, 20 November 1817:

“It will, without doubt, have come to your Lordships’ knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the circumpolar regions, by which the severity of the cold……………….in an impenetrable barrier of ice, has during the last two years greatly abated. This affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened………………………………

and

The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulafft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far North as 81 degrees 29 minutes.

Soundings to 3,100 metres show the Gulf Stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have completely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the Eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have so far never ventured so far North, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. Within a few years it is predicted that, due to the ice melt, the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.”

[NeilBlanchard]

Yeah, you're right and 97% of all climate scientists are wrong.

We'll trust you and your judgement, and ignore all the scientists, on something as important as the future of life here on the only planet we have. Yeah, that makes sense...

Everyone knows that a cooling climate causes ice to melt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTUgh...layer_embedded

Tell us, Mr/Ms Arragonis, will we be hit by any meteors in the next few decades? How about the risk of disease epidemics? When and where will the next big storm hit? Are you watching the sun for massive plasma ejections?

[Arragonis]

The origin of the 97% figure.

This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2008 master’s thesis by student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman at the University of Illinois, under the guidance of Peter Doran, an associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences. The two researchers obtained their results by conducting a survey of 10,257 Earth scientists. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers — in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout...

... answered the two key questions on the survey:

1 When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?

2 Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

The questions posed to the Earth scientists were actually non-questions. From my discussions with literally hundreds of skeptical scientists over the past few years, I know of none who claims the planet hasn’t warmed since the 1700s, and almost none who think humans haven’t contributed in some way to the recent warming — quite apart from carbon dioxide emissions, few would doubt that the creation of cities and the clearing of forests for agricultural lands have affected the climate. When pressed for a figure, global warming skeptics might say humans are responsible for 10% or 15% of the warming; some skeptics place the upper bound of man’s contribution at 35%.

[TheEnemy]

1 When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?

2 Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

By answering those two questions, even I would fall into the 97%, and I disagree with the ammount of warming that is claimed that we are responsible for. Questions like those were covered in one of my analysis classes, and a source of much bias.

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by Arragonis

An amusing letter.

That's an awesome letter. Nobody does snark like the educated English. ...although, it is a little heavy on the commas.

Here, have a link to an article you might like on Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Great Eastern.

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by TheEnemy

By answering those two questions, even I would fall into the 97%, and I disagree with the ammount of warming that is claimed that we are responsible for. Questions like those were covered in one of my analysis classes, and a source of much bias.

Pretty much everyone would agree with them, even me.

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by freebeard

That's an awesome letter. Nobody does snark like the educated English. ...although, it is a little heavy on the commas.

Here, have a link to an article you might like on Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Great Eastern.

You may also like this letter written by the same author to a Bishop who proposed planting dozens of wind-turbines on locals who didn't want them - the CofE is a major landowner in the UK - and not very ethical either.

14 June 2012
Rt. Rev. Michael Langrish
Bishop of Exeter
The Bishop’s Office
The Palace
Exeter, UK

Dear Bishop Langrish,

Earlier in the week I listened to what you had to say following the welcome decision to withdraw the diocese’s application to erect wind turbines in Devon. I see that your remarks have now been republished in The Daily Telegraph. In particular, it is striking that you consider that you and your staff were subjected to abuse by objectors. Well, I was not part of any such exchanges and do not condone, in your own words, ‘bullying tactics’. On the other hand, I cannot help pointing out – to a churchman and so an ethical standard bearer, most especially – that such tactics are an absolutely routine component of the dialectical arsenal favoured by climate change proselytisers, amongst whose ranks the prelatariat of all denominations have constituted a prominent and discreditable cadre of alarmist partisans. Accordingly, whilst I will certainly not stoop to the use of opprobrious language, neither do I have any intention of pulling punches simply in deference to ‘the cloth’, if I may so put it.

Fortuitously, the story of your wind turbines has broken almost exactly with the publication of recent pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), supplemented by parallel pronouncements by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, another global warming alarmist body sustained, in this case, by the American government. These prompted me to write to my local MP, George Eustice – as you will know, an erstwhile press guru to David Cameron. Rather than going to the bother of re-inventing the wheel, as it were, what follows is a slightly altered text of what I wrote to him two days ago; the nature of the IPCC/NOAA pronouncements will become evident towards the end:

It is always intriguing to note how people such as yourself, who proselytise this issue, invariably settle for sweeping generalisation in preference to the more taxing task of addressing specifics; Yeo, for example, could give master classes in dissimulation. This has consequences. In an immediate sense, it makes it hard to decide whether you have understood my email of 8 June, which initiated this exchange or, indeed, have even read it.

Climate change major risks: Such as? There is not one shred of empirical evidence for your assertion. There is, of course, an ocean of mendacious and fraudulent computer modelling by people with vast vested interests in promoting the scam. These embrace individual scientists, to the lasting shame of each academia, scientific societies and publications, the prelatariat of all religious denominations (‘faith communities’, rather primly and sententiously I suppose we must now call them), NGOs, civil servants, politicians, the media and a number of industrial enterprises.

You state that you do not underestimate my ‘strength of feeling on this important issue’. With respect, you are well wide of the mark. I have no strong feelings about climate change. Climate change is fact of life and, in that sense, is a banality. I do, however, have a prejudice against blatant chicanery and outright knavery. You add that you, personally, do believe in dangerous human contribution to so-called climate change. In order to entertain such a proposition, you must accept that, within the context of a vast, chaotic system such as the atmosphere, minor changes to the concentration of a benign trace gas (let me remind you, in overall concentration amounting to less than 1/25th of a single percentage point) can of itself generate catastrophic climatic consequences; in any contemplated response, do please avoid the impulse to quote water vapour – for alarmist promoters like you, a very insecure, double sided argument! No, allow me to suggest, again with respect, that this is an intellectual construct which cannot be advanced with honesty of purpose. And yet, it is upon this vast inverted pyramid constructed on the summit of a sand dune that this disreputable government, as well as its lamentable predecessor, has founded the UK’s energy and economic policies.

Neither is this, anyway, a scientific issue. The science is clear. There have been and are no untoward changes in global climate outside those which flow from natural variability. There have been no recent climatic phenomena, which do not have numerous precedents. CO2 has nothing to do with the matter.

On the other hand it is an ethical issue. The ethical considerations arise from the activities of propagandists when:

they seek to howl down any form of questioning or dissent,
they use threatening vilification as a propagandist tool,
they damage the careers of those who have the temerity to question their dogma,
they wilfully and knowingly misrepresent data,
they wilfully and knowingly suppress contra-indicative data,
they claim data to be authentic and rigorous when, in reality, it is cherry picked from partisan environmentalist propaganda material,
they undermine scientific method by refusing to disclose and share data/methodology,
they wilfully subvert and prostitute their calling for personal gain and self-aggrandisement,
they subvert hitherto trusted forums of scientific discussion and dissemination,
they subvert the independence of peer review as a legitimate check and balance,
they abuse the young by indoctrinating deviant ‘science’,
they lay waste to the environment with worthless and hideously expensive machines (wind/tidal turbines) as well as other devices such as photo-voltaic cells,
they oppress the poor by diverting land usage from food crop cultivation to uneconomic and inefficient mono-crop cultivation of so-called biofuels,
they wilfully associate their personal conceits and financial interests with massive environmental pollution in the developing world,
they are complicit, for the same reasons, in rainforest and other forms of environmental destruction,
they manipulate the fiscal arrangements of entire countries on the basis of demonstrable falsehood,
they spread lies designed to intimidate poorly educated and/or gullible populations,
they claim economic insights based upon false assumptions, corrupted data and outright lies,
they sustain vast departments of state to promote falsehood and scaremongering,
they subsidise supposed independent pressure groups for the purpose of surreptitiously encouraging partisan lobbying,
they lend succour and support from the safety of privileged positions, inherited and otherwise, to villains and scientific charlatans,
they seek to close off and monopolise what should be legitimate debate on a controversial matter of importance, again from behind barricades created by privilege,
they ostentatiously ignore whatever is inconvenient to their tendentious paradigm, however distinguished and credible the sources may be,
they whitewash arrant knavery,
they distort, in furtherance of their mendacity, the normal accepted meaning of language,
they subvert the hitherto trusted organs of mass communication.

Well, enough to be getting on with, I suggest. The questions are how to mitigate the damage/how to hold to account those responsible for it!

So back briefly to my communication of 8 June. The point of that email was to draw to your attention a recent pronouncement – let it be stressed, not from a sceptical voice but from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after all your very own supposed primary source of information/wisdom in this matter, and backed up by none other than the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, another major climate alarm propagandist. And what were these two saying? Why, to be sure, that solar panels, one of the major supposed low carbon palliatives so much beloved by you and in such evidence in your own constituency, as by-products of their manufacture, are in reality delivering to the atmosphere what are now measurable quantities of greenhouse gases of a virulence representing entire orders of magnitude greater than any comparable effect produced by carbon dioxide which, in your declared philosophy, is the primary bugaboo. Moreover, these gases, in marked contrast to CO2, are entirely man made and are also vastly more long lasting.

As I stated at the outset of this message, it is not clear to me whether or not you grasped what was being said. In any event, if you can explain the logic of this wondrous contribution to the welfare of the planet, not to mention the rivers of treasure diverted to its promotion, I’d be interested to hear the case.

During the last few days, the papers have been awash with the C of E’s objections over the issue of whether or not a brace of homosexuals should be able to ‘marry’. As it happens, in relation to this specific issue, I am rather on your side. But, since I am also addressing a churchman, there also springs to mind the new testament reference to motes and beams. These, of course, are contained in a parable directed mainly at hypocrisy but which is also about relativities. What is being weighed in the scales is the comparatively minor issue of some aspect of personal conduct on the one hand and, on the other, the wilful corruption of the species’ greatest achievement, namely the forging of an instrument for the exploration of objective truth; I refer, of course, to scientific method. In terms of their relative importance, so disproportionate are these two contrasting alternatives that it seems almost ridiculous to consider them in the same sentence. And yet, you and your confreres agonise over the trivial and consider yourselves virtuous when you ignore the infinitely greater – indeed far worse, for, willy nilly, you take on board and promote a fallacious, corrupt and massively damaging pseudo-scientific proposition.

Of course, as the wind turbine affair makes clear, there is money potentially to be made from pursuing the global warming mythology and if, by nature or nurture, you are of a religious bent, I suppose that one mythology may be thought of as pretty much like another. In any event, I’m sure that cupidity in no way impacted upon the decision making processes of the diocese in its originally misguided efforts to reduce its ‘carbon footprint’. Clearly, though, the fatuousness of that soubriquet fails to strike you.

This letter is already long enough, so I will resist the urge to comment further – well, save perhaps to say that, with one shining exception, namely George Pell, Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, the positioning of the prelatariat in the so-called climate change controversy has been devoid of moral insight, but rich in sanctimonious self-preening.

Your own recent declarations are at one with that.

Yours sincerely,

R.C.E. Wyndham



cc. Archbishop of Canterbury Bishop of London Archbishop of Westminster As the spirit moves

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Here, have a link to an article you might like on Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Great Eastern.

The SS Great Britain was abandoned in the Falklands until the 1970s and then some guys recovered it and floated it across the Atlantic back to Bristol where it has been restored. There was an interesting episode where they had to sink it to within 2 feet of the river bed so it would fit under a more modern bridge before they could move it.

Google BBC Archive there is a documentary about it in there - amazing stuff.