Lomborg: uses irrational name-calling and denies the evidence

The Australian published Bjorn Lomborg: A Rational Take On Warming last week.

It was self-contradictory, baseless name-calling from a formerly sensible writer.

Rational?

Lomborg and Gore are not so far apart

The only rational response to climate change is to use empirical, observable evidence. Rational people can point to results from 28 million radiosondes, 6000 boreholes, 30 years of satellites, 3000 ARGO ocean diving thermometers, raw data from thousands of surface thermometers, as well 800 peer reviewed references which include studies of corals, caves, pollen grains, ocean floor sediments, ice cores, and diatoms.

Lomborg is happy to call these rational people names, but irrationally doesn’t appear to have read their arguments. His method of quoting scientific studies, which was so successful on other topics, has come unstuck on climate science. He doesn’t realize that the US government poured $79 billion dollars into demonstrating one theory, but next to nothing to research, audit, or question that theory. He’s been tripped up by the skewing effect of monopolistic funding.

Far from being rational or scientific, he accepts the opinions of the Scientific Gods at the IPCC, and ignores the empirical evidence

Far from being rational or scientific, he accepts the opinions of the Scientific Gods at the IPCC, and ignores the empirical evidence. It’s a step back to the stone age. In a rational world — when the evidence disagrees with the opinions — scientists toss out the fake Gods and go with the data.

His ignorance of the scientific side of the debate is one thing, but the hypocritical name-calling is quite something else. He calls it juvenile pie-throwing, but he still uses the word denier, specifically saying the skeptics deny the “ever-mounting evidence”. My challenge to Lomborg is to name one paper we deny. He’s adopted an Orwellian misnomer. The term is designed to denigrate and dehumanize, why does he play that game?

And for those who think the term “alarmist” is name-calling, think again. It’s an adjective and it fits. The so-called deniers don’t deny anything, but an alarmist is someone who wants to alarm us. Can anyone think of a better term for what the IPCC do? More »

Oreskes, Readfearn: Got no evidence? Throw different names. Skeptics are paranoid ideologues afraid of reds under the bed.

Ad Hominem Unleashed (aka ABC): On the origin of the sceptics

Commentators on a sinking ship search for reasons to “keep the faith afloat”.

The debate has moved a peg. Instead of “oil shills” now we’re just paranoid ideologues afraid of reds under the bed.

Naomi Oreskes

The battle cry: the “skeptics” are shills of big oil, has become an own goal. The PR team for the catastrophic theory have no new evidence of Big Oil funding and thousands of people now point out that the UNskeptics were paid 3500 times as much (at least). So they are moving on… the religiously devout believers can’t admit they were wrong, and nor can they look at the evidence, so what’s left? Post hoc random over-analysis of the irrelevant. Before, skeptics were paid hacks… and now they’re wrong because they … are ideologically against big government and regulation. From one ad hom to another.

And again, the ABC uses our taxes to promote the smear campaign, support neolithic reasoning, and does everything it can to stop people talking about scientific evidence (by spreading misinformation or slurs about all the characters on one side). Oreskes and freelance writer Graham Readfearn can’t discuss the evidence (or lack of) for their favourite faith, but they spend a lot of time digging up irrelevant details instead.

Are man-made emissions a problem? How would we find the answer? Look not at sedimentary rocks but at stationery and submissions.

Are man-made emissions a problem? How would we find the answer? Look not at sedimentary rocks but at stationery and submissions. As if the answer to tropical convective processes might be hidden on IPA letterhead, or in subliminal messages coded in the number of peer reviewed reports. It’s tea-leaves and rune-stones stuff, and people kid themselves that Blackberries or Androids make us modern, but the writing of people like Oreskes and Readfearn reminds us that human brains still carry software from the paleolithic. They simply can’t string a reasoned scientific argument together, but instead reflexively resort to discussing motivations, character, ideology or just gossip about “who their friends are”.

Here’s Oreskes. She “knows” she’s right, she just has to figure why other people haven’t seen the light too:

“It’s part of this whole ideological program of challenging any science that could lead to government regulation, because it’s part of an ideological conviction that all regulation is bad, that any time the government steps in to ‘protect’ us from harm, that we’re on the slippery slope to socialism, and this is the ideology that you see underlying a kind of almost paranoid anti-communism. So even after the Cold War is over, these people are seeing reds under the bed.”

Ponder the inanity of “paranoid anti-communism?” More »

ABC admits it’s a propaganda arm of the government

What Mark Scott admitted as the managing director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was really what everyone knew anyway: the ABC aims to please the gatekeepers of the pay-checks (which is, after all exactly what we’d expect from most organizations in the long run).

What makes it telling is that he could forget that he’s never supposed to admit this. I mean, they promote themselves in ads as “our ABC”. It’s supposed to serve the people, not the government. The key problem is that although the people pay for the ABC, they don’t hold the purse strings. And to some extent, the people, don’t really try to either. We get what we are willing to put up with.

THE ABC managing director, Mark Scott, has told an audience of film and television producers that the way he had been able to secure additional funding was by convincing the government the national broadcaster was working in its interests.

For a long time, Mr Scott said ABC management had simply gone to Canberra crying poor and telling the government what a great job it was doing.

“And I think if you take that approach, well, then you’ve joined the queue of people who feel hardly done by who are in Canberra with their hand out. And I’m not sure that’s a smart way of getting dollars, frankly,” Mr Scott said.

Wait for it:

“I think you’ve got to couch the arguments in terms of what we are in a unique position to deliver that is in the interests of government of the day,” he said, in an address to the Screen Producers Association of Australia conference in Sydney.

Read it all at the SMH

In order to serve the people, the ABC could be putting government policies under the blow-torch. For a moment, just hypothetically, imagine the government wanted to bring in legislation that would cost billions, be nearly impossible to unwind, would commit the country to pursue inefficient, expensive, underdeveloped technology, make the country uncompetitive, and it was all based on lost data, inexplicable “adjustments”, pronouncements of foreign agencies, and fallacious reasoning, (not to mention being pushed by big banks). More »

Thorne 2010: A very incomplete history of the missing hot spot

Emails are coming in about the latest attempt to announce that they’ve “found the hot-spot”: Thorne et at 2010.

It’s already being used in NOAA press releases to repeat the same line about how a “new scientific study” supports the models. The aforementioned support is rather weakly phrased as being “broadly consistent” (which somehow means the same thing as being “90% certain” a catastrophe is on the way, right?).

But it gives them another chance to claim it’s been found:

This new paper extensively reviews the relevant scientific analyses — 195 cited papers, model results and atmospheric data sets — and finds that there is no longer evidence for a fundamental discrepancy and that the troposphere is warming.

It says something about how important the hot spot is that they keep “finding it”. (Even though they never seem to issue a press release saying it’s missing.) But since the data from the last warming spell came in ten years ago, there are only so many ways they can rehash the same numbers. So now they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel in desperation. This new study is not a “new scientific study”, it’s a new review. This paper tells us upfront that its only distinctive contribution is to the “evolution” and “history” of this key point.

So they’ve run out of reanalysis, now they’re doing a peer reviewed history? (What’s next? The theatrical debunking where Discovering the Hot Spot hits Broadway in 2011?)

In any case, as histories go, this one is strategically very incomplete. Thorne et al doesn’t even mention McKitrick, McIntyre, and Herman (MMH)’s key paper which categorically refuted Santer 2008. (So Santer 08 is misleadingly listed as having “refuted” Douglass 2008 as if it was uncontested.) I described the incisive McKitrick et al paper and its conspicuous success in: The models are wrong (but only by 400%). More »

How the BBC became a propaganda arm of the UK government (and WWF)

Andrew Montford (Bishop Hill) and Tony Newbery (Harmless Sky) have put in a submission to the review of the BBC’s impartiality on science. It’s the anatomy of how government and activist groups take over an arm of a public broadcaster. There is no sneaking in the back door here.

The main problem facing government and policymakers was convincing the public that concern about anthropogenic global warming was well founded, and not just another scare story that would soon be forgotten. The Climate Change Communications Working Group (DEFRA, EST, UKCIP, Env. Agency, DTI, Carbon Trust) was set up, and in February 2005 received a Short List of Recommendations from Futerra, an environmental PR consultancy, on the means of conveying the required message to the media and the public . In August 2006, the IPPR produced a thirty-page report entitled Warm Words: How are we telling the climate story and can we tell it better? which developed Futerra’s recommendations. This concluded that:

Many of the existing approaches to climate change communications clearly seem unproductive. And it is not enough simply to produce yet more messages, based on rational argument and top-down persuasion, aimed at convincing people of the reality of climate change and urging them to act. Instead, we need to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement. To help address the chaotic nature of the climate change discourse in the UK today, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won, at least for popular communications. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken. (emphasis added)

Essentially, the communication technique recommended to the government to use on the people was the sophisticated tactic: “bluff them”. The truth is not what matters. There’s apparently no need to explain the uncertainties, and no reason to treat the voters as grown ups. Don’t mention the evidence.

That the BBC science-journalists weren’t appalled at the IPPR document and the in-house seminar held earlier the same year (see below) is testament to the feeble derelict state of university science and “journalism” training. Does no lecturer explain the core difference between a reporter and a copy-writer for an ad agency?

Where were the strikes and protests from journalists as they were being asked to be the lap-dog sock puppets of the ruling class, and feed approved newspeak to the masses?

The day the BBC stopped “investigating” was in January 2006 More »

The death of reason at UWA

Stephan Lewandowsky reasons by bad-analogy

How do we know man-made climate change is a mortal threat? Some people discuss radiosondes, but for Lewandowsky, the answers lie in laser surgery, gravity waves, airplanes, bridges, AIDS, nanotechnology, falling apples, and driving cars into brick walls.

On Ad Hominem Unleashed (otherwise known as the ABC), Lewandowsky is working his way through the fallacies season by season — he’s tried argument from authority, he’s hailed expert opinion, and even pretended that expert opinion is evidence.

So now, moving right along into Spring, he’s come to a variation of the “insurance” argument. Having told us how absolutely certain everything is, with a straight face, he’s now telling us it’s uncertain, but basically, since we absolutely definitely know it might be bad, we ought to reject the best source of energy known to humankind, and try all the alternatives, no matter how uncertain they are, even if it kills people. (I’m sure he doesn’t think of it that way, but he might change his mind if he spent a day with a mother in Tanzania who can’t afford to boil drinking water and is nursing a child with typhoid.)

Follow his “thinking”

Lewandowsky is so ahead-of-the-pack with fallacies, that possibly he has even invented some new ones.

Because eye doctors recommend surgery for detached retinas, your family should pay $1,000 a year to reduce carbon emissions.
Because we know gravity “happens”, we therefore should reinvent and rebuild our civilization’s energy infrastructure.
Because tobacco companies tried to influence a public debate on a different topic twenty years ago, citizens should accept everything anyone from a university says, regardless of the vested interests of the proponent. (Of course there are “no university professors” who disagree with Lewandowsky, because skeptical university professors, in his head anyway, are not university professors — seen through the veil of the ad hominem reflex, they’re “industry sponsored players” .)

Patronisation unleashed More »

Dessler 2010: How to call vast amounts of data “spurious”

This is part of the big PR game of publishing “papers.”

In the climate models, the critical hot spot is supposed to occur because (specific) humidity rises in the upper troposphere about 10km above the tropics. The weather balloons clearly show that temperatures are not rising as predicted, so it was not altogether surprising that when Garth Paltridge analyzed weather balloon results for humidity, and found that humidity was not rising as predicted either.

Indeed, he found specific humidity was falling, which was the opposite of what all the major climate models predicted and posed yet a another problem for the theory that a carbon-caused disaster is coming. He had a great deal of trouble getting published in the first place, but once he finally did get published and skeptics were starting to quote “Paltridge 2009″, clearly, Team AGW needed an answer. “Dessler 2010″ is transparently supposed to be that answer.

To start by putting things into perspective, lets consider just how “spuriously” small, patchy and insubstantial the radiosonde measurements have been. According to NOAA The integrated Global Radiosonde Archive contains more than 28 million soundings, from roughly 1250 stations.

Worldwide radiosonde stations (NOAA)

…
Or how about the data from just one month.

ARSA : Location and number of radiosonde reports
selected for the month of November 2009
(Click the figure to enlarge it or click here)

The ARSA site estimates there are around 40,000 radiosondes released each month. (While the NOAA site above suggests it’s been closer to 50,000 per month. And it’s been something roughly like that every month since 1958).

The radiosonde results are uncertain, but they suggest specific humidity is falling (and the error bars all fall in the negative range). So how do you dismiss that wall of data going back for half a century? More »

Breakthrough: DEC ‘s all-purpose (green) business licence

In a handy discovery The Department of Environment in WA have found a way to issue a licence that give businesses “all they could ask for” while at the same time keeping the Green complaints to a manageable minimum.

You'll need to click here to see this DEC license

...

It’s the perfect license for politicians who want to have an answer for ABC radio.

…

Central page for information on The Thompsons.

Mystery Solved: Why the PR hacks exploded their credibility

Click to read the full PDF

The world was baffled. What were they thinking?

This colossal PR disaster was 20 years in the making, and it took a special set of conditions to achieve a true marketing black hole. Never before in the history of public relations has so much star-power, money and kudos been used to score such a monstrous global own-goal. The campaign to dehumanize skeptics laid the groundwork and somehow, fittingly, the eco-terrorists own name-calling has come back to bite them.

How could people with red carpet careers make a mistake so smashingly spectacularly awful that they scored negative press all round the world, lost 20% of their members, and drove away three out of four major sponsors within days?

They can’t be written off as a little side group of extremists. 10:10 was sponsored by the UK government, major corporations like Sony, and was a group of nearly 100,000 people (now only 73,000). A hundred odd people must have spent months preparing, with casting, scripting and special effects meetings, so they could capture the effect of exploding ten-year-olds without once noticing the rather invidious parallels with, say, Pol Pot. Incredibly the 10:10 death-flick mini movie was even going to be played at cinemas (light the pyre, throw good names in the fire, and invite the media…).

To avert leaping into this disaster with two feet and a jet propulsion unit, all they had to do was run one focus-group, say, on three people at a bus stop. Total cost: 2 minutes and 50 cents. So just how could the 10:10 team corner the market in PR-poison in just a four minute mini movie?

Why did they think ruthlessly killing children was funny? –

because in their heads, they weren’t killing children,

…they were killing deniers.

(And what’s a 10 year old denier? Dead meat.)

They had spent years dehumanizing, ridiculing, and denigrating anyone that disagreed. Two decades of noxious name-calling and rampant bullying had laid the groundwork for The Marketing Disaster of the Century.

This PR disaster was destined to happen sooner or later.

From the dictionary: Dehumanization — To deprive of human qualities such as individuality, compassion, or civility: slaves who had been dehumanized by their abysmal condition.

Just as Tutsis were called cockroaches, and the Jews were called vermin, when a scientist is a denier, they’re automatically a fake, and without the human ability to reason, they’re sub-human.

So somehow, fittingly, the eco-terrorists own name-calling campaign has come back to blitz them. The dehumanization program worked so well in their own heads, it didn’t occur to any of them that they were publicly fantasizing about being inhumane tyrannical murderous thugs. They had dehumanized their targets to the point that no one in a room of supposedly top brains stopped and said “maybe blowing up kids is just a bit base?”

It’s a whole new class of marketing disaster

The 10:10 video will be engraved into folklore and infamy.

The 10:10 team made seismic misjudgements

Here are three core reasons they were setting themselves up for a disaster: mostly involving a lack of research and an inability to reason. Their habit of “living in a bubble” cost them dearly. More »

Soul searching enviro-journalists admit they look duped and should have talked to sceptics

There is much introspection going on among environmental journalists. Last week, in a remarkably candid piece, Margot O’Neill of the ABC revealed for the first time what the flummoxed and frustrated would-be journalists are discussing behind the scenes.

The admissions are extraordinary. Despite the fact that hardly any of the journalists wrote about Climategate, for many the emails from East Anglia were not just important, but a defining moment (though not, apparently, because it dented their faith in the global warming dogma). Instead, it was the effect Climategate had on editors and others in the office: people who had previously thought climate science was scientific, and environmental journalists were journalists. Suddenly, others realized they had been cheated of the real news, sideswiped by a development none of the supposedly “investigative” reporters saw coming.

Now for the first time, we find out that the formerly respected writers got looks of betrayal.

Probably the most important reaction to the UEA hacking for journalists was in their own newsrooms, among their own editors who are the gatekeepers controlling if your work appears and how prominently. While some UK surveys show no dramatic loss of credibility for climate scientists with the public, here’s how some senior journalists described what it was like in their newsrooms after hacking:

“dirty looks”

“sense of betrayal”

thought we’d “gone native”

“you told me the science was settled – and it isn’t!”

Presumably, the other editors read about people using tricks to hide declines, but instead of seeing the would-be journalists pursue the obvious deceit and malpractice, they must have been shocked to hear whitewash excuses about how it was “taken out of context”. This is the point when alarm bells must have gone off for the real journalists in the room. It was not just the Climategate emails themselves, but the rush to downplay them. Methinks you doth protest too much.

How bad was climategate? Awful:

Climate-gate was extremely damaging in many ways. It gave the impression that journalists had been duped…

Wow. I mean, WOW! Let’s repeat that. It gave the impression that journalists had been duped. Yes, it did “look” like journos had been duped. That’s because they were. Fooled by one of the oldest tricks in the book. More »

Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? How many excuses does it take?

Announcing the full version of the Climate Corruption series. There are two copies with different formatting, one here and one on the Science and Public Policy Site. (Click on an image below for the respective PDF version).

Foreword
By Joanne Nova, October 2010

How many excuses does it take?

(Size: US Letter -- with SPPI's usual professional formatting)

The Western Climate Establishment has allowed egregious mistakes, major errors, and obvious biases to accumulate — each factor on its own might be hard to pin down, but the pattern is undeniable.

The Western Climate Establishment is cheating:

Official thermometers are overwhelmingly in warm localities such as near air conditioner exhaust vents, buildings, concrete, tarmac, or asphalt.
Officials hide the Argo data, which shows the world’s oceans are cooling.
They ignore hundreds of thousands of weather balloon results that show the climate models overestimate future warming by at least 300%.
Climate scientists frequently point to the last 130 years of global warming, but don’t mention the full story: the planet started warming before 1700, over a century before humans started pumping out meaningful amounts of CO2.
Leading authors publish a crucial graph with a deceptive colour scheme that imitates the results they wish they’d got. Why did a leading peer-reviewed climate journal publish such a naked and childish attempt at cheating?
The Russian, Chinese and Indian climate establishments, which are financially independent of the western climate establishment, are all skeptical. As are many scientists from other branches of science, and many retired climate scientists (who no longer have anything to lose by speaking their minds).

Only a fool would ignore the message in the pattern

Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt

(Size: A4 -- This version will be updated)

Once one or two major news outlets start printing these photos of official thermometers near artificial heating sources, and point out the deception, the rush will be on for our elected representatives to abandon the Global Warming Crusade. No one wants to be seen to be taken in by half-truths and shameless deception. Who wants to look gullible because they didn’t ask the obvious burning questions?

Those who support conclusions based on corrupt behaviour will be seen as negligent for not having considered the serious evidence here.

Dr Evans is a scientist who was on the climate gravy train, and was horrified by what he saw. He first blew the whistle in a polite way in 2008. Too many of the world’s politicians have not yet woken up, so here he collects the worst examples of climate shenanigans and explains them powerfully in terms that any politician can understand.

These photos speak for themselves. The corruption of climate science has become so blatant, so obvious, that even non-scientists can no longer throw their hands in the air and say “I didn’t know”. You don’t need a PhD to know it is cheating to place thermometers near artificial heat sources and call it “global warming”.

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November 8th, 2010 | Category: AGW socio-political, Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post | Email This Post | Comments (100)

Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating

The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating

Dr. David Evans
7 Nov 2010

[A series of articles reviewing the western climate establishment and the media. The first and second discussed air temperatures, the third was on ocean temperatures, and fourth discussed past temperatures, the fifth compared the alleged cause (human CO2 emissions) with the alleged effect (temperatures), the sixth canvassed the infamous attempt to “fix” that disconnect, the hockey stick, and the seventh pointed out that the Chinese, Russian, and Indian climate establishments (which are financially independent of the western climate establishment) disagree with the western climate establishment about the cause of recent global warming and the eighth showed how government institutional and funding pressures created the consensus among western climate scientists. The ninth showed the evidence that the amplifying feedbacks, responsible for two-thirds of the model warming projections, are not present in reality—and that the lame response of the establishment was to miscolour a graph to mislead us into thinking those feedbacks were observed when they were not. The tenth noted the resort to Orwellian language to strengthen the case for the theory, and the crucial lie in Gore’s movie about the cause of global warming.]

Click to download a pdf file containing the whole series

An alternate PDF has been produced for the media in collaboration with the Science and Public Policy Institute, that PDF version is here.

Conclusion

BERJAYA Until now this series of articles has been simple and direct as possible (though accurate and well referenced). It was written this way to cut through the clutter of words and rhetoric, so even people like jaded newspaper editors might pay attention. For everyone else, here are a few words of opinion and analysis.

The western climate establishment supports the concept that global warming is man-made, and disparages all other theories. They issue reports that overwhelm their readers with detail, written in dense language that is difficult for a layperson to decode. Basically their message is authoritarian: “we are the experts, it is very complicated, you can’t understand it, so just accept what we say.”

But their message is nonsense. Everyone is familiar with temperature, and everyone (except the “politically sophisticated”) knows that siting official thermometers near air conditioners is cheating. The reality is that the temperature and other data has become unfavorable to their climate theory, so they hide behind complexity and authority instead of simply telling you what is going on.

While their theory seemed plausible 15 years ago, new evidence has proven the influence of CO2 to be greatly exaggerated. There is a germ of truth to their theory, but our emissions are not nearly as serious as they make out. The western climate establishment does not want you to know this, presumably for fear of losing the considerable income, perks, status, and influence that has come their way since they started promoting their theory. So they have taken to bamboozling us with “science”, and to cheating. More »

Another Minnesotans for Global Warming parody…

The Minnesotans for Global Warming have produced I’m a denier to the Monkey’s song I’m a believer...

It’s not the way I would have made it, but it’s funny.

I fight the use of the term, but these guys coopt it. It’s the opposite approach but it also chips away at the power of the namecalling bullies. More »

November 6th, 2010 | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | Email This Post | Comments (35)

Australia’s High Quality Data: 12-year-sites used for “long term” trends

Where did the "adjusted data" come from? The process they use is not documented.

What would you say if you knew our high quality temperature record included sites with 100 year long “records” which were based on just 12 years of data and some undisclosed method was used to construct 90% of the graph?

Wow? I mean, Wow?! Why are these sites with such little actual data being included in a series called “high quality”?

Presumably the “adjusted” trends were recreated (in a sense) by homogenizing data from nearby stations, but why not use just the stations with long records in the first place? Out in the vast outback there are long distances between stations, and while a “splice” might overlap for ten years, who knows whether the dramatic PDO oscillations don’t shift weather patterns during their 30 year cycle and mean that any ten year period is not indicative of the longer time frame.

BOM compensate for the Urban Heat Island effect by making adjustments that essentially result in almost no change in the trend. They remove the “urban” stations, but UHI affects even small populations, and Andrew Barnham speculates that the largest changes in the UHI effect may occur in these smaller rural locations that are still included.

Andrew Barnham has done an independent assessment of the BOM trends, using a slightly different methodology to Ken Stewart, but like Ken, this raises grave doubts that our high quality records are done in a rigorous manner. We need both the BOM and CSIRO audited, independently.

As usual, Barnham did this pro bono and deserves a big thank you for his dedication and skill.

–JN

Analysing Australian Temperature Trends

Guest Post By Andrew Barnham

The article Australian warming trend adjusted up by 40% was published on Jo Nova’s blog on 29th July 2010. This work by Ken really caught my attention as it stands in stark contrast with consensus claims that the homogenization process is simply a ‘fine tuning’ process and that it barely impacts the final trend result. For example, on GISS website, generating anomaly trend graphs using adjusted or unadjusted data yields very little difference. So assuming that Ken’s result is accurate, then the Australian dataset stands at odds to this. The following is largely a replication of Ken’s work, using slightly different tooling and methodologies. In this I analyze Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) data comparing modern temperature sets used by the BOM to construct Australian land surface anomaly figures used by the BOM for purpose of contributing to the climate change narrative. I scrutinize raw data compared to adjusted data. I also scrutinize the process BOM use to compensate for local climate effects. A link to all computer source codes used in this analysis can be found at the bottom of this article.

Firstly, credit to the BOM for making the information very easy to access and for structuring the data in a consistent and easy to analyse fashion. Because of this, it only took me a few hours to secure and organize the data which allowed me to focus on actual analysis.

Some months ago the Bureau of Meteorology published this now famous image which is readily accessible on their website. It is a temperature anomaly reconstruction of Australian land surface temperatures that shows that based on a 1960-1990 baseline period, Australia has warmed by 0.9°C over the past century.

BERJAYA

The image can be accessed directly from their website here: Australian climate variability & change – Time series graphs

Following is my reconstruction of the same data set using their High Quality (HQ) adjusted data series. Visually the results are a very close fit which gives me confidence that I have replicated their process with sufficient accuracy (the process they use is not documented). More »

An update from the Thompsons down under

The Thompsons farm lies idle, under siege.

For all the supporters of the Thompsons, Janet writes to describe the kind of limbo they are living in. The eviction day October 15, came and went in a blur of work. They remain on the property only due to court injunctions, which have no certainty. Matt and Janet are their own lawyers — doing all the paperwork — with helpful advice from all round, especially Peter King. Legal suits were launched from both sides. The Thompsons are basically under siege, living week to week in their home, waiting, though not sitting still. They can’t farm, so creating political pressure and fighting in the courts are their only options.

It’s an all or nothing game — they have to raise public support: 1/because it’s the best way to pressure the government (by shaming them), and if they could get an effective bankable license the situation might be transformed. 2/ Because for the bigger picture, it seems that hardly anyone is gathering the farmers, fishermen, landholders, and producers. Janet and Matt are a magnetic node in a embryonic movement that is desperately needed here. And 3/ Where is The West Australian?

The Thompsons business went from thriving to dying because the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) changed their license conditions for political reasons, partly it seems because the Thompsons spoke out against the theory of man-made global warming. The cause of their plight is purely political, not business-related. Therefore the solution, if any, has to be a political one.

To give an idea of just how political this is, who should turn up at the last two hearings between a bank a business? None other than Paul Byrnes from the DEC. Why are taxpayer dollars being used to “watch” legal proceedings between two private groups? DEC are spooked, and so they ought to be. Their lack of professionalism, tyrannical power, and misuse of taxpayer funds is being exposed.

Guest post from Janet Thompson

We are still on our property, living behind locked gates, not ever leaving our property unattended, for fear that the receivers will move in, take equipment and change the locks while we are gone. More »

Who are the deniers now?

The people are rising up in protest. Today my inbox theme is of people emailing me with responses of the questions they are putting to the Establishment — at universities, institutes, and political parties – to the ABC, UWA and The Greens in particular. In all the cases they received answers that deny there is a problem, but between the lines you can tell that those forced to write the replies are feeling the heat.

And may the heat escalate.

I’ll be publishing as many as I can.

This story below came in this morning about Roger Helmer MEP (UK), who was invited to speak to the VC of East Anglia (ie. Climategate central). He asked if he could bring “two friends”, which was fine until they turned out to be Monckton and Delingpole, at which point the UEA’s staff were suddenly forced into a demeaning dance, doing all they could to limit the damage by artificially splitting up the group into separate appointments.

Squirm squirm squirm. There is fear in their eyes… why go to so much trouble to prevent a few skeptics being in the same room at the same time?

10:10 spin til it hurts

After the marketing disaster of the century, 10:10 desperately needed to save some face. They had accidentally showed us their totalitarian desires and lost at least 20,000 members in a week. How embarrassing.

How do you hide that? In true PR form, you frame your membership numbers and “save” the members you lost: keep the thousands of people (or fakers) who have joined and then left your group on your tally. (Just don’t call it “current members”.)

On their new redesigned home page they say they have 110,340 worldwide …wait for it…”sign ups”.

But as far as the UK members go, what was once 94,910, is now still just 74,190. More »

Two million pageviews

BERJAYA Well, well, well. Google Analytics clocked up 2 million pageviews for joannenova.com.au in the last 12 months:

2,032,353 Pageviews
340,000 unique visitors
coming from 199 countries*
and leaving 38,000 comments

(*If anyone has a friend in Chad, Niger, or Zaire, you could email them and we could bump that country tally up to 200. Similarly, I’ve bombed out in Turkmenistan and North Korea. I guess there are places where “climate change” is not even a question they would ask in phone surveys … if they had surveys, or I guess, phones. Those are lands where esoteric debates about carbon footprints are irrelevant.)

All up, around 3,000 visitors drop in each and every day, and it often spikes to 5,000 – 7,000 (many of the unique visitors visit more than once).

Just for comparison’s sake, Quadrant online announced it had one million plus page views per annum, back in September. Coincidentally Quadrant and I both started out at about the same time, they with 156 supporters, and me with with one (thanks David. ).

Along the way lots of others have helped with the Tip Jar, some repeatedly, and I do so appreciate it. Even spare change. (If most readers gave 10 cents per view, I’d have a very decent salary . I started a special thank you list of names, but where do I draw the line? Some people have been very generous, and sometimes a small donation from a person with six kids and not much to spare can be just as motivating. I decided instead to stick with personal emails. (Give me time, I will get my email list up to date!). More »

Insurance that kills

A helicopter arrives at the scene of the crashFrom Metro.co.uk

The great Piers Corbyn popped in when I wrote the first post about the 10:10 video. His comment on that thread is the most popular (rated by thumbs up) of any of the 38,000 comments on this site (110 thumbs up). This below is that comment, which fits with my recent theme of What’s the harm in acting?

For those who don’t know, Piers uses solar factors and writes long range weather forecasts and does it with uncanny accuracy — he predicted the Copenhagen Blizzards a month before Copenhagen. His site is Weather Action. He’s so good at predicting atmospheric action that over 12 years, he won so many bets on the weather the bookies gave up and begged him to stop. (The odds were set by the UK met office.)

He discusses the often unseen but deadly costs of bad decisions. In this case, Natasha Jade Paton might still be alive today if authorities had sought better advice than that from deeply flawed climate models. Piers warned them they would run out of road salt.

There are thousands of people who think that “taking insurance” is like paying an extra $10 on your Pan Am ticket in case you have to cancel — i.e. irrelevant and minor. But the real costs of changing our energy systems (when we don’t need too) or building an unnecessary currency (affecting virtually every transaction around the globe) are v-a-s-t. Piers captures one specific example below of the deadly cost of bad decisions.

10:10 threatened to kill people, but Piers points out that their incompetence already does. More »

Donna Faragher: armed with unpublished complaint-mail and an unbankable license — destroys livelihoods

Donna Faragher, Minister for Environment and other stuff.

Some people have recently received replies from the Minister of the Department of Environment in Western Australia.

The ten second answer to the latest DEC excuses: The Thompsons License is unbankable; the Thompsons have already met the conditions; the complaints are unverified and often solicited, or relate to some other business, and Donna Faragher can teach you how to spell “business certainty” but she hasn’t got a clue what it is.

I’ve added my thoughts below, in between the full grey-box-quotes of the letter.

____________________________________

Minister For Environment; Youth

Thank you for your email to the Western Australian Government dated 22 September 2010 regarding the Narrogin Beef Producers cattle feedlot in Narrogin.

Good to see that through the magic of electronic communications it only took one month and four days to reply.

By way of background to your letter, Narrogin Beef is one of 44 licensed or registered cattle feedlots in Western Australia. The Narrogin Beef feedlot is the only feedlot in Western Australia which has been the subject of significant and ongoing community complaints about unreasonable odour. Between January 2005 and August 2009, 487 odour complaints were received, which complainants attributed to Narrogin Beef. This is a very high number of complaints regarding a licensed premises. Between December 2009 and August 2010, there were no cattle on-site and no community complaints regarding odour were received.

So DEC received 487 complaints from an unlisted number of people. Was that 22 complaints each from 22 people, or 487 complaints from one? Did it include emails? Did it include all the times DEC phoned up previous complainants to invite them to give more “feedback”? (Do solicited complaints count?) What process has the department used to make sure that none of those complaints are really about other causes, like the smell of the piggery next door? Or how about the time that I hear Coles put manure on their gardens and people complained. Janet told me those complaints were still in the file listed against Narrogin Beef. The local action group (helped by big city lawyers) also made sure that there were handy flyers around town with the local Complain-about-The-Narrogin-Beef-Feedlot-Hotline-Number (Dial: XXX YYY Winge-winge-winge). Anytime someone fertilized their garden, there just might have been a handy reminder on the next door neighbor’s fridge to call Donna Faragher at DEC.
More »