Climate Lessons

For the Climate Classroom Wall: ocean heat content observed and predicted

2012-01-27T13:03:00.000Z

Note the predicted trend (straight red line) compared with some actual observations.

Quote 'If the model mean continues to diverge from the observations, how many years are required until the models can be said to have failed?'

This is a good statistical question, but it also serves an honest rhetorical purpose as a comment on this chart.

(Source: Bob Tisdale Hat-tip: C3)

Compare it with this material aimed at 'kids' on the NASA site:

'The ocean does an excellent job of absorbing excess heat from the atmosphere. The top few meters of the ocean stores as much heat as Earth's entire atmosphere. So, as the planet warms, it's the ocean that gets most of the extra energy.

But if the ocean gets too warm, then the plants and animals that live in it must adapt--or die.
Algae and plankton are at the bottom of the food chain. Plankton includes many different kinds of tiny animals, plants, or bacteria that just float and drift in the ocean. Other tiny animals such as krill (sort of like little shrimp) eat the plankton. Fish and even whales and seals feed on the krill. In some parts of the ocean, krill populations have dropped by over 80 percent. Why? Krill like to breed in really cold water near sea ice. What would happen if there were no sea ice? What would happen if there were very little plankton or krill? The whole food web could come unraveled.'

Quote 'The whole food web could come unraveled.'

Do you think by any chance they want to scare the 'kids'?
Q. How can they justify this?
A. Because the model projections look alarming

Might be enough to persuade you to read Bob Tisdale's article linked to above.
Or research into what kind of of temperature rise would mean 'the ocean gets too warm'.

The Devil waits for his own: what Burns might have penned for the Green Lords of today

2012-01-25T15:33:00.002Z

This being Burns Day, I will mark it with an extract from one of his poems in which he imagines the devil (Beelzebub) looking forward to an aristocrat coming to join him in due course after a long and healthy life. Burns was addressing some Lords, and one in particular, who objected to some poor highlanders trying to escape their poverty by emigrating to North America in 1786. He hoped that these folks would find someone like George Washington to help them achieve their aims and escape from those Lords who would prefer to keep them under their control. He hopes there will be no equivalents of the prominent Lords (North, Sackville, Howe, Clinton) who fought against Washington’s cause - American independence.

Address Of Beelzebub

Long life, my Lord, an' health be yours,

Unskaithed by hunger'd Highland boors;

Lord grant me nae duddie, desperate beggar,

Wi' dirk, claymore, and rusty trigger,

May twin auld Scotland o' a life

She likes - as lambkins like a knife.

Faith you and Applecross were right

To keep the Highland hounds in sight:

I doubt na! they wad bid nae better,

Than let them ance out owre the water,

Then up among thae lakes and seas,

They'll mak what rules and laws they please:

Some daring Hancocke, or a Franklin,

May set their Highland bluid a-ranklin;

Some Washington again may head them,

Or some Montgomery, fearless, lead them,

Till God knows what may be effected

When by such heads and hearts directed,

Poor dunghill sons of dirt and mire

May to Patrician rights aspire!

Nae sage North now, nor sager Sackville,

To watch and premier o'er the pack vile,

An' whare will ye get Howes and Clintons

To bring them to a right repentance

To cowe the rebel generation,

An' save the honour o' the nation?

They, an' be damn'd! what right hae they

To meat, or sleep, or light o' day?

Far less - to riches, pow'r, or freedom,

But what your lordship likes to gie them?

The rest of the poem, with a plain English version alongside, can be found here.

Well the ‘Lords’ nowadays are the leaders of the big green NGOs such as the WWF, with useful lords attendant such as Pachauri and Gore. And those they would deny ‘meat, or sleep, or light o’day’ are the world’s poor, most especially those in the developing countries. Paul Driessen tells their story.

And, of course, nowadays, as back then, we have good and decent, and real, Lords too. Not least Lord Lawson and Lord Monckton. I feel sure Burns would have wanted to support the GWPF and the SPPI!

For the Climate Classroom Wall: anthropogenic sustainability threatens communication catastrophe

2012-01-24T11:32:00.004Z

http://xkcd.com/1007/

The rising levels of 'sustainable' are presenting a major threat to the global communications system, and could even undermine efforts to destroy industrial civilisation by the propagation of alarm about a beneficial trace gas in the atmosphere. So many participants in these efforts rely on 'sustainable' as a powerful charm to drive away the evil spirits of adventure, optimism, honesty, and scientific rigour. But as yet, few of them seem to be aware of this major threat to their campaigns. 97% of linguists agree that this key word is under threat of losing any meaning whatsoever, noting that it is already in a 'vague, woolly, and confusing' state. A little cabal of UN insiders is, thank goodness, preparing a plot to preserve at least a vestige of substance for this precious word, a word so dear to so many intent on controlling our lives, crushing the spirits of the young, and rubbishing the achievements of the past. Emissions controls will be agreed to keep usage below the safe limit of 1ppm - a level not seen since the 1980s. It may already be too late for some green sites. Take a look at this example, merely one among the thousands where this vital word is being deployed with a fearful frequency.

(hat-tip for the cartoon link: Jane Coles, comment on 'Unthreaded' yesterday (Jan 23, 2012 at 10:47 PM) at Bishop Hill)

Update 25 Jan 12: A serious threat to the control of sustainable emissions is looming at the so-called Earth Summit in Rio this June: 'In an attempt to avoid too much confrontation, the conference will focus not on climate change but on sustainable development ...' (source) Hat-tip: Climate Change Dispatch
It would seem that the fuss over AGW has served its purpose and will now be sidelined in favour of 'sustainable development'. More here on that by Luboš Motl.

Cittadini attenti! Opera Administrators turned Climate Activists target your Children

2012-01-23T15:20:00.000Z

Like something out of the old Soviet Union, where all sorts of enterprises would have been inclined to declare their dedication and support for the current 5-year plan, no matter how remote from their competences, the Opera House at Glyndebourne has taken it upon itself to teach the young a thing or two about climate:

Exhibit (1)
'Gus Christie Executive Chairman Glyndebourne Productions Ltd said:

“The wind turbine is part of an environmental ambition for Glyndebourne and is a response to the global climate threat. We are proud that the turbine will make a significant contribution towards the achievement of renewable energy targets within this region. As an internationally renowned opera house, we want to use our profile to encourage other businesses and individuals to preserve the environment. Climate change is a certainty in our lifetime and we all need to take responsibility for this.”

Exhibit (2)
'Nationally over 15,000 people participate in Glyndebourne’s annual Education Programme. When the turbine is operating in 2010, Glyndebourne Education will undertake a project focusing on the environment and creativity, using the turbine as its foundation in primary schools within a 25 mile radius of Glyndebourne. This project will be implemented throughout the school year and is expected to involve over 4,000 children. For all other ongoing community projects appropriate emphasis will be given to Glyndebourne’s environmental strategy. Glyndebourne will engage its Youth Groups, with over 100 participants aged eight to 18, in making the turbine the focus of their programme in 2010. Glyndebourne will also give talks about the turbine to the 3,500 students attending its performances for schools and ensure that the turbine will form part of our Opera Experience workshops enjoyed by 2,500 primary and secondary students each year.

Both exhibits found here: glyndebourne.com/news-article/wind-turbine-proposal-press-statement

All this will go down well enough in the upper echelons of the BBC, the Royal Society, the Labour Party, the Green Party, and no doubt quite a few other playpens for the political class. But it will not go down well with the people and councils of Sussex who opposed the turbine and had their views squashed by Hazel Blears acting for a government 'back in the day' that did not hesitate to push climate alarmism for political advantage - even to the point of deliberately frightening children. And it will not go down well with anyone who is familiar with the diseconomies of windpower, nor with anyone who is familiar with the profound weaknesses of the case for alarm over human impacts on climate. Nor with anyone who does not care to see the skyline od the Downs needlessly and extravagantly industrialised at the expense of electricity consumers, raptors, bats and others at risk from the blades.

Pic credit

Much as I love opera, much as I would dearly love to go to a performance at Glyndebourne, I can only wish them maximum embarassment from this venture. I predict the thing will be dismantled within 5 years, and after that, if not before, I hope the Opera House will devote itself to opera, and not to being a victim of political activists nor to being a pusher of child-unfriendly and scientifically absurd alarmism over CO2.

Melodramatic posturing around 'the global climate threat' might make for an amusing light opera, but it will not make for good education.

Climate Credulity of Operatic Proportions: a misled schoolgirl and a monument to madness at Glyndebourne

2012-01-22T20:35:00.001Z

http://www.sussexdownsmen.org.uk/news/turbine.html

A large turbine has been erected on a site 80m above sea level, owned by and overlooking the famous Opera House at Glyndebourne. The location is on the South Downs, a particularly beautiful part of south-east England. Naturally, the erection of such a burden on electricity consumers, and a noisy, dangerous disruption to a once-precious skyline to boot, was preceded by a lot of opposition in planning, but the primary beneficiaries of the subsidies, Northern Energy and presumably the opera house, have welcomed it. The Guardian newspaper gave the official opening very generous coverage (indeed only a Labour government minister intervening gave it the go-ahead against local wishes). Hat-tip for the Guardian link and some discussion of it at Bishop Hill.

A senior pupil from a nearby school is reported as making this disturbing remark:

‘I don't get how anyone can object to it. In a few years' time they won't even notice it. In another few years, if we don't do something about climate change, this view won't be here anyway because we'll all be under water.’

The location of the turbine is on a hillside at about 80m above sea level, in the midst of the South Downs which go up to 270m above sea level. The nearby village of Glynde is at about 25m above sea level, and near to a low river valley only 5 to 10m above sea level (the location is close to the south coast, near Lewes).

Even the discredited and despicably alarmist IPCC only projects global sea level rises in the range of 0.2 to 0.6m by the year 2100. Recent trends is the slow and steady sea level rise of the past 150 years suggest that even the lower end of this range may be of the high side for some locations at least. The sinking of the SE corner of England into the sea at around 0.5 to 1mm per year might add as much as another 0.1m to the sea level rise there, but we are still dramatically short of threatening Glyndebourne. An expert in coastal erosion in England, E.M. Lee, has noted much exaggeration in projections based on IPCC reports:

‘."perhaps we were all too keen to accept the unquestioned authority of the IPCC and their projections." Thus, he ends by stating "I am left with the feeling that a healthy skepticism of the climate change industry might not be such a bad thing," ‘

Oh that the teachers of this deluded schoolgirl had had such insight! There is not the slightest prospect of the sea reaching Glyndebourne 'in another few years', and arguably not even in whatever may be left of the Holocene if we are close to the end of it.

Who taught what and when to this schoolgirl? Perhaps she is exceptionally credulous and vulnerable to scare stories. That does not forgive those who have misled her, but it does give hope that not all her classmates are in the same sorry state as she is with regard to climate change and sea-levels.

A propaganda puff for the turbine by Northern Energy and the local council may deserve part of the blame. It confidently declares that:

 ‘There is now compelling evidence that human activity is changing the world’s climate. Temperatures are rising and so are sea levels. Extreme weather is becoming more common.’

All four of these assertions are misleading to the uninformed reader to the point of severe deception. First, two platitudes: climate changes all the time, human activity must affect it. All things in and around the climate system affect it. It is immensely complex, and driven by powerful forces that make any plausible human effect look derisory in comparison. In recent decades, the system has been acting pretty much as if the additional CO2 was having no effect at all. For rebuttals of all four assertions in this short sentence by Northern Energy, let me just direct the interested reader to the C3 web site. Scroll down to find dozens of papers, mostly peer-reviewed studies in the scientific literature, that undermine each of the scaremongering claims being exploited by Northern Energy.

Meanwhile, from California, another playground for those driven to distraction by eco-scares, here’s some sea level history there for the past 70 years( Real Climate & Data source)

Scary, eh?

Not the sea levels - they'e acting just as if the rising CO2 does not matter - but the alarmism.

It is scary that so many can be fooled so easily and so deliberately by so few based on so little.

Gilbert & Sullivan would have had a field day with this sorry fiasco at Glyndebourne.

Picture for the Climate Classroom Wall: the apparent impotence of airborne CO2 as a driver of warming

2012-01-21T10:49:00.003Z

The C3 website has used the latest data published by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center to produce the above chart.

Two adjacent 50 year periods are compared side by side, for overall global temperature rise, and overall ambient CO2 rise:

1912 to 1961: the temperature increase is 0.52C, the CO2 increase, 18ppm.
1962 to 2011: the temperature increase is 0.41C, the CO2 increase, 74ppm.

Whatever the overall effect of the CO2 increase is on global temperature, it is clearly not a dominating factor causing warming. The atmosphere is behaving as if the extra CO2 does not really matter very much at all since the temperature jumps are similar, whilst the CO2 jumps are clearly not.

Note.

Steven Goddard at Real Science describes a similar result, using the periods 1975 to 2008, and 1915 to 1944. These periods also are believed to show a modest warming of similar size, but the former period had a far larger increase in CO2 attributed to it (54ppm compared to 9ppm). These periods are of interest because they appear in Email 2234 of the Climategate set– as highlighted by Tom Nelson.

(Edited 22 Jan 2012 to delete last two sentences in the original Note for being inessential)

Climate Change Scaremongering threatens the physical as well as the mental wellbeing of children: wind turbines in school grounds now complement the scare stories in school rooms

2012-01-20T14:05:00.002Z

Wind-turbines have been installed in schools in the north of Scotland, no doubt driven by the Scottish government’s pursuit of its nightmarish daydream of massive expansion of wind-energy. A pursuit being justified by a supine trust in assertions that (a) rising CO2 levels in the air are a real and present danger of great severity and (b) modest reductions in human-related emissions in industrialised countries can have an appreciable effect on them, and on climate. I say modest, because it is well-established that windfarms have a next to negligible effect in reducing industrial CO2 thanks not just to the CO2 produced in their manufacture, installation, and maintenance, but also to the CO2 from the required back-up provided by conventional power sources forced to operate in a sub-optimal way and the additional CO2 from relocation of industries to countries with fewer emission controls. In addition, examples abound that even a wholesale overnight cessation of human-related CO2 emissions in entire countries such as Australia would, by the theories of the IPCC itself, have a negligible effect on climate. We may conclude that a shutting-down of Scotland would have even less effect. Only abject fear could make anyone lose so much rationality as to want to pursue such a goal. The kind of fear that climate alarmists would love to see spread throughout our schools.

Pupils at risk from school turbines claim

‘Information provided by the authority shows that turbines have been erected, at a cost of £25,000 each, at nine north schools – Crossroads Primary (Thurso); Castletown Primary; Bower Primary (Wick); Culloden Academy (Inverness); Craighill Primary (Tain); Dornoch Academy; Inver Primary; Stoer Primary and Gairloch High School.’

But they are being opposed, as the article at the above link explains:

‘HIGHLAND Council’s policy of erecting 6kw micro wind turbines at schools is putting pupils at risk, a north-west Sutherland woman has claimed.
Dr Stephanie James, of The Smithy House, Stoer, wrote this week highlighting her concerns to the authority’s top official, chief executive Alistair Dodds.
She fears it is only a matter of time before there is a fatality caused by a turbine malfunction.
Dr James, who has previously contacted planners a number of times about her concerns, decided to take action again after a blade flew off a small domestic turbine situated behind Rhu Stoer Village Hall.
No-one was hurt in the incident which happened at Hogmanay.
Dr James was among a number of people who objected to the erection of both the micro turbine at the eight-pupil Stoer Primary and the one at the village hall.
Planning consent for the Proven WT6000 turbine, mounted on a 15metre column at Stoer school, was granted in April last year. The 6kw turbine has a rotor diameter of 5.5metres.
The 15m high Eoltec Scirocco turbine at the hall was given the go-ahead by planners in November 2010 and erected six months ago.
The council has pursued a policy of erecting turbines either on school buildings or in school grounds in a bid to save money and to boost their green credentials.
A similar turbine at the Rhue Stoer Hall was also given the go-ahead in November 2010 and erected amid much controversy.
In her letter to the chief executive, Dr James points out the failure in November 2009 of a 50metre high wind turbine installed at Raasay School which collapsed and landed in the school playing field.
She claimed that in recent years there had been 66 fatalities with many more injuries in the UK as a result of various wind turbine malfunctions.
She states: "Pieces of blade are documented as travelling up to 1300 metres and blade pieces have gone through roofs and walls of nearby buildings.
"Other serious incidents have occurred through structural failure from poor quality control, lack of maintenance and component failure. As turbines are now being placed in relatively close proximity to buildings, including schools, the accident frequency is expected to rise." ‘

We can add this to reports relayed on this site of the school room unfit for use because it was too cold by design, and the school rooms unfit for use because they were too cold by choice of the headmaster, and the school turbine shut down for killing birds and distressing children in the school grounds. A report of the Raasay incident mentioned above is given here, from which the following extract is taken:

'Wind blades fell in school yard

Published: 21/11/2009

Children at an island primary were sent home after a newly-installed wind turbine next to their school collapsed, it emerged yesterday.

Parents of youngsters at the 18-pupil Raasay Primary School were asked to collect their children following the incident on November 13.

The 50ft turbine will “remain out of commission” until an investigation has been carried out.

The 6KW machine was installed at the school earlier this month, but was soon the subject of complaints due to the noise it was making.’

These are examples of so-far minor harm from policies driven by climate alarmism, and they illustrate the foolishness that such policies can drive people to. Scotland will increasingly look ridiculous as the rush into renewable energy increases costs, increases risks to life and limb, reduces reliability of supply, increases damage to the environment, and brings degradation of wild places with industrial equipment that will be abandoned and left to rot as and when the subsidies dry up. And dry up they must as other countries pursue the possibilities for far cheaper energy from shale gas and methane hydrates, not to mention the more familiar coal, gas, nuclear, and oil reserves, making Scottish industry uncompetitive and Scottish domestic life impoverished in comparison.

A wind turbine lies on its side after crashing to the ground in Lothian and Borders during high wind conditions

P.S. It is happening in the States as well, as this report from Indiana shows: 'Opposition is forming to the Eastern Howard School Board’s plans to install a 350-foot-tall wind turbine on the southern edge of Greentown.' (hat-tip: Industrial Wind Action Group)

Climate Change Conflict in the Classroom: positions provided for the teachers vs questions provided for the pupils

2012-01-16T12:45:00.004Z

On the one hand, a ~~large~~ non-profit organisation in the United States, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is reported today as intending to 'mount an aggressive effort to teach the nation’s schoolchildren that climate change is real and is being driven by human activity.' (hat tip: Tom Nelson)

On the other hand, a professor in Australia, Ian Plimer, has recently published 101 questions on climate in a book entitled 'How to Get Expelled from School' .

They both take an aggressive stance:

NCSE: 'Climate change denial is already threatening the integrity of science education in public schools and elsewhere. These attacks occur in individual classrooms, local school boards, state boards of education and state legislatures, and informal learning environments. And even in the absence of explicit attacks, science educators report experiencing implicit pressure to compromise on the scientific accuracy of their presentations of climate change. NCSE helps concerned citizens to defend accurate science education in all of these settings.'
Plimer: 'The issue of human-induced global warming is about power and has little to do with the environment, saving the planet, creating a better world and freedom of speech. Except when travelling in communist and other totalitarian countries, all my life I have enjoyed freedom of speech. The present state of public debate on climate is such that the government-approved beliefs are virtually compulsory. Those imposing their apocalyptic doctrinal views upon want no rational civilised argument (e.g. "the science is settled"), claim that there is a "consensus", attempt to denigrate, and vilify and marginalise those who question the dogma (e.g. "climate deniers").'

The report in the Washington Times, suggests that the NCSE wants to 'launch a public relations effort. If it is successful, climate change skeptics could become a small minority and might be derided for their beliefs.' The NCSE site's new section on climate change is already replete with frequent use of the 'denier' insult, and of course is maintaining that its proposed attack on climate realists is akin to its attack on religious fundamentalists over 'intelligent design'. I think they have fallen off their fence on to the wrong side - their new campaign will support the green fundamentalists and those who ride on their backs to win political power. The cause of good science, and honest straightforward schooling, will be advanced not by them and all the wealth of Big Green, but by such as Plimer and his humble list of questions in the minds not just of pupils but of parents, politicians, and teachers themselves.

Note added later: This report describes the NCSE as 'small':
'NCSE, a small, nonpartisan group of scientists, teachers, clergy and concerned individuals, rose to prominence in the last decade defending evolution in the curriculum. The controversy around "climate change education is where evolution was 20 years ago," said Eugenie Scott, executive director of NCSE.'

Teachers, whatever you do, don't tell your pupils that climate science is settled about global warming

2012-01-04T12:22:00.001Z

The general awareness of climate science may have been severely contaminated by special-interest groups such as the WWF and GreenPeace intent on swelling their coffers and assuming heroic stances simultaneously. It is not easy for teachers to present a calm and sensible view in these circumstances, not least if their curricula have already been invaded by such interest groups. Two things, however, seem reasonably clear:

(1) nothing extraordinary has been observed in weather phenomena over the past 30 years of the CO2 scare, and much of what has been seen contradicts the forecasts of some prominent alarmists such as the streets of New York remaining above sea level, polar bears increasing in numbers, storm levels failing to increase, and of course tropospheric temperatures refusing to shoot up.

(2) learned scholars dispute the core mechanisms posited by some scientist-alarmists as being at the heart of their concerns. The quote below is evidence of this dispute:

'Recently, Gerlich and Tscheuschner listed a wide variety of attempts to explain the so-called atmospheric greenhouse effect. They disproved these explanations at the hand of fundamental physical principles like the second law of thermodynamics. By showing that 1) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, 2) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, 3) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 K is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, 4) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, 5) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, 6) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, they concluded that the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

Based on our findings, we argue that 1) the so-called atmospheric greenhouse effect cannot be proved by the statistical description of fortuitous weather events that took place in a climate period, 2) the description by AMS and W·MO has to be discarded because of physical reasons, 3) energy flux budgets for the Earth-atmosphere system do not provide tangible evidence that the atmospheric greenhouse effect does exist.'

Source: a recent paper by Kramm and Dlugi entitled ‘Scrutinizing the atmospheric greenhouse effect and its climatic impact’

http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=9233

(hat tip: Greenie Watch, http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2012/01/carefully-reasoned-new-paper-finds-no.html#links)

New Year Resolutions for Climate Scientists - eye-openers for some teachers of climate change?

2011-12-29T13:08:00.000Z

Steven Goddard has compiled some very worthy resolutions for any climate scientist involved in the promotion of climate alarmism in particular, and shoddy-science in general. They will be eye-openers for some teachers of climate topics. Here are the first 15 of them - see his post for the rest:

I will admit that warming has been much slower than we expected
I will admit that recent sea level rise is nothing unusual or threatening
I will admit that our forecasts of declining snow cover were wrong
I will admit that Arctic temperatures are cyclical, and that we have no idea what will happen to Arctic ice over the next 50 years
I will admit that our forecasts of Antarctic warming have been a total failure.
I will admit that Polar Bear populations are not threatened
I will admit that climate models have demonstrated no skill, and are nothing more than research projects
I will admit there was a Medieval Warm Period
I will admit that that there was a Little Ice Age
I will stop pretending that we don’t have climate records prior to 1970
I will admit that the surface temperature record has been manipulated and is contaminated by UHI
I will stop making up data where none exists
I will honestly face skeptics in open debate.
I will quit trying to stop skeptics from being published
I will admit that glaciers have been disappearing for hundreds or thousands of years

Merry Christmas to all my readers

2011-12-20T18:02:00.001Z

http://en.indonesiafinancetoday.com/read/14593/Oh-Christmas-Tree

Thank you for visiting here. Haste ye back in the New Year!
I don't 'have religion' myself, but I do find so much of the music, singing, and sentiments of Christianity very moving so here is a carol to mark the season:

A lifetime's worth of climate alarmism in a nutshell

2011-12-18T12:09:00.001Z

I think this comment by David M Hoffer (posted on WUWT) provides a witty but true summary of the alarmist positions and debating styles since 1971, with a 'projection' for the year 2031 ( I have added the boldening and italics):

Natural variation and climate cycles explained:

1971
Alarmists: There’s an ice age coming!
Skeptic: Looks like natural variation, not a long term trend….
Alarmists: Blasphemer! Ice Age! We’re all going to die!

1991
Alarmists: The world is heating up at an unprecedented rate!
Skeptic: But you just said….
Alarmists: CO2! CO2 is causing unprecedented warming!
Skeptic: OK, forget the ice age then, it STILL looks like natural variation, not a long term trend…
Alarmists: Blasphemer! Tipping point! We’re all going to die!

2011
Skeptic: You know, looking at the last 10 to 15 years, it doesn’t seem like there’s been any more warming….
Alarmists: Natural variation! It's hiding the warming!
Skeptic: Hiding the warming? Where?
Alarmists: Blasphemer! The warming is hiding in the bottom of the ocean where we can’t measure it, and/or being masked by aerosols, and/or being hidden by natural variation! We’re all going to die!

2031
Alarmist: There’s an ice age coming!
Skeptic: Looks like…never mind, I know where this is going. We’re all going to die. I for one, because a) I'm old and b) I’m sick to death of listening to alarmism.

Climate Classroom: questions to stick on the wall

2011-12-13T17:01:00.001Z

'The climate-change con artists'
is the title of a post by Leighton Steward in which he recalls Travesty Trenberth's Lament 'we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment', and goes on to pose eight questions which he would like to see addressed by climate alarmists, or 'climate-change con artists' as he also more colourfully describes them. I think these questions would make a fine poster for the wall of any classroom in which climate change is raised:

Why can't warming alarmists produce a single legitimate example of empirical evidence to support the manmade global-warming hypothesis?
Why has Earth been warming for 300 years when man has only emitted measurable amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere for the last 150 years?
Why did Earth cool for 500 years before the recent 300 year warming and warm for several hundred years before that when even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says CO2 levels did not change?
Why was the Medieval Warm Period, a thousand years ago, warmer than today even though the CO2 level was 38 percent lower than today?
Why did many of Earth's major glaciers in the Alps. Asia, New Zealand and Patagonia begin to retreat nearly half a century before the Industrial Revolution and man's CO2 emissions?
Of the last five interglacials, going back 400,000 years, why is our current interglacial the coolest of the five even though Earth's CO2 level is about 35 percent higher?
Why has our current 10,000-year-long Holocene epoch been warmer than today for 50 percent of the time when CO2 levels were about 35 percent lower than today?
Why are correlations of Earth's temperature with natural factors such as sunspot numbers, solar cycle lengths, solar magnetic variations and changes in major ocean currents all better than the correlation of Earth's temperature with CO2 levels?

I am waiting for my copy of Plimer's new book - it will shortly be in carry-on luggage and flying through the air to me from Australia. I'll review it here later this month, and I anticipate a bumper crop of further questions that the conscientious teacher will not find any answer for in any climate-alarm-fouled syllabus. They would however be of value as conversation-pieces, or discussion-starters for any suitably qualified class with a suitably courageous teacher willing to raise questions about the relative importance of CO2 as an influence on climate..

According to the source:
Leighton Steward is a geologist, environmentalist, author and retired energy industry executive. He currently heads up the organization Plants Need CO2 and is a veteran of television and talk radio where he helps educate the public and politicians about the benefits of CO2 as it relates to the plant and animal ecosystems.

Happy Head, Chilly Children, Troubled Teachers, Perplexed Parents, Riled Readers - an example of authoritarian eco-arrogance at work

2011-12-06T19:08:00.006Z

First the Head:

Quote from article 'The school's headmaster, Rob Benzie, shut down the radiators as an experiment to show students how the school could cut its carbon footprint.

''We turned off the heating as an experiment to see if we can lower our carbon footprint,' he said.

'We allowed pupils to wear as many jumpers as they liked and everyone seemed to be happy enough although it did get pretty chilly."

Then the children:
'Pupils at Ansford Academy in Castle Cary, Somerset, were forced to grip their pens through thick gloves and wear their coats and hats in class as temperatures dropped to 1C.'

And the teachers:
'One teacher said: 'It was absolutely ridiculous I have never experienced working in such cold conditions.
'I am all for saving the environment but to conduct an "experiment" as the head calls it on such a cold day is beyond stupid.
'The kids were complaining, no one was working properly some of them could not even write because they could not grip a pen through woolly gloves.
'We have a number of pupils with mental and physical disabilities here and they really struggled with the cold.
'It was unnecessary and in my opinion barbaric.'

And the parents:
' mother, whose 12-year-old daughter goes to the school, said: 'My daughter was physically shaking when she came home.'When I heard about this eco day I was absolutely furious.
'I wanted to take my daughter out of school but I was worried I'd get into trouble with the authorities.'

and

'One father said: 'I was just shocked when I found out what had happened.
'I have never heard of such a ridiculous idea. Turning off all the heating in December is just mental.

'The kids could get sick I can't believe any of them learnt anything.

'I know when I am cold I can hardly function. I'm absolutely furious with the school.'

Finally, the readers:
Here are the currently top-rated comments to the Daily Mail article from which the above quotes are taken:

Another idiot who shouldn't have any contact with impressionable youngsters.

- Tommy Cockles, Liverpool, 6/12/2011 7:18

Yet another eco-loony who thinks he can 'save the planet'. The planet can take care of itself, as it has done for billions of years.

- Owd Tyke, Devon, 6/12/2011 8:20

These are the teachers preparing the next generation for the work-place - Heaven help us! Typical leftie - more obsessed with a trendy ideology than teaching his pupils the three R's. These are the sort of people who ban religious instruction because they consider it superstition yet embrace with boundless enthusaism the new 'religion' of man-made climate change, which is pure fantasy.

- Gibbo, Stansted, Essex, 6/12/2011 7:20

What better way to teach children that climate alarmists are nutty?

- Casey, Maine, US, 6/12/2011 8:07

There is nothing more dangerous in life than a man (or woman) with a cause. Such people lose commonsense and it becomes impossible to reason with them

- Jeremy R, Sheffield, England, 6/12/2011 8:33

he is breaking the HSE rules on heating a work place.

- Geoff , Cleveland, 6/12/2011 9:15

I think I agree with all the top-rated commenters to this article in the Daily Mail. Here is an example of someone who should not be in a position of such control over the young. He clearly needs help himself to deal with his neurosis. Inflicting it on others is not forgiveable unless he has completely lost the plot, in which case the failing lies with the education authority which continues to employ him. His action does indeed seem to be illegal, as he has some duty of care. The whole sorry business is a tiny example of the narcissistic inhumane authoritarianism of the 'green movement'.

Note added 7 Dec 2011

And now the blogs. This story has been picked up quite widely today, and by some widely read, influential sites. Here are three of them:

(1) Instapundit

‘#GREENFAIL: Children left to freeze in the classrooms after head turns off heating on coldest day of year ‘to show how school can be eco-friendly.’ It’s a valuable lesson: “Eco-Friendly” just means “in the hands of the smug and sadistic.”
UPDATE: Michael Tinkler notes that at least nobody’s blowing them up. So far.'

(2) The Daily Bayonet:

Lessons in Hypothermia

Hippies hate kids. How else to explain their murderous, misanthropic meanness toward moppets?
A headmaster at a British school decided a great lesson in sustainability would be to turn off the heat for a day. In December:

(3) The Register:

Headmaster freezes schoolkids for Gaia

Earth Goddess requires sacrifices

By Andrew Orlowski

Posted in Environment, 7th December 2011 08:02 GMT

Pagan gods traditionally required human sacrifices – preferably of children – and a West Country academy school appears to be leading the way. To give pupils a lesson in "sustainability" they'll never forget, headmaster Rob Benzie of Ansford Academy in Castle Cary, Somerset, ordered a "No Power Day ... as an experiment to see if we can lower our carbon footprint".

Added later still on 7 Dec 2011
WUWT is covering it too. This sure is catching attention!
'The local school authority and parents should probably teach Mr. Benzie the lesson that freezing children to push a radical green agenda makes his job unsustainable, before he does something really stupid.'

Note added 8 Dec 2011
It can be instructive to look at the data. Here are the values of Max and Min temp in degC recorded at a Met Office station in the same county as this school. The data are for Yeovilton, and can be downloaded from here

Whichever bit of 'global warming' was exercising the headmaster, it surely was not in SW England.

WUWT Exposes Suzuki Foundation Scaring the Kids for Climate Cash

2011-11-30T18:52:00.003Z

The post at WUWT begins as follows:

'Here’s the popup
message
solicitation you get when you visit the website for the first time:

Climate change is melting the North Pole and it’s no longer safe for Santa and his Workshop. So our dear old friend is packing up the sleigh to find somewhere else to live.

You can help! Move your mouse over this website to find gifts you can buy Santa to help him set up a temporary Workshop and protect the North Pole for his return.

Of course, you’re savvy enough to know we won’t be sending actual gifts to Santa. You will receive a tax receipt for 100% of your purchase and proceeds will be used by the David Suzuki Foundation to support our critical work to protect nature and the environment from threats like climate change.

Buying these green gifts and personalized ecards on behalf of hard-to-buy-for friends or relatives on your holiday list is a great way to show you’re thinking of them — and the planet!

Act now to help Santa!

Sincere thanks,
The David Suzuki Foundation

This is nothing more than a thinly veiled revenue generator for the foundation.
No shame, no scruples, just send money. Is it any wonder informed people are doubting the climate change issue when presented with crap like this?'

I was at the EIKE conference in Munich last week, and it was interesting to note the spontaneous and strong applause for a couple of the speakers when they noted with disdain instances of children being scared by climate propagandising. Most of us, I suspect, don't like it when people set out to to scare our children. Or anyone else's children. So this shoddy advert will probably backfire on Suzuki in his attempts to get more cash and more converts.

Note added later: Suzuki has form on scaring children. From The Daily Bayonet in September 2008:

'David Suzuki has a new article published on his Foundation web site. This time, instead of imploring the world to listen to him just because he’s old, he is trying to make children guilt their parents into voting with the environment in mind.
His article is full of scare-mongering language and imagery, but there is not one scientific reference or fact in it. Suzuki knows the science is far from settled, but he also knows that if it came to a debate, he’s on the losing side. So he plays on emotions; emotions like fear. To children.'

Note added 1 December 2011. H/t Climate Depot

This tawdry stuff has happened before.

July 2010 in the States: http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2010/07/madness-of-joel-rogers.html A foul oaf called Joel Rogers: '“Here is a picture if you want of the polar ice caps melting, Santa Claus is about to drown. You should tell your children uh that uh these people in your state that oppose taking steps in your state on global warming, they are trying to kill Santa Claus. Once you have the kids you know another 14 years and they are going to vote.” Joel Rogers.'

December 2010 in the UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/dec/03/children-climate-change-television-santa? Agitprop at work:
'The new 10-part children's show, Mission: Green Santa, has been licensed to ITV and in each 12-minute episode, climatologist and amateur reporter, Dr Maurice Bergs will tell children about the dangers and global warming and encourage them to log onto the Green Santa website to make an environmental pledge.'

Note added 3 Dec 2011.
'All this may seen merely petty, but it is troublesome nonetheless. What the Suzuki Foundation is doing is sending out a scare notice to children everywhere that Christmas is in jeopardy, Saint Nick adrift and lost, making the fate of both of them dependant on giving to the cause. I'm not saying what the Suzuki Foundation is doing is immoral. I will say they have given new life and vigour to the word "tacky." Scaring kids and guilting parents is monumentally tacky.'
Source: http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/Give+money+Santa+gets/5806726/story.html

Parents, school pupils and teachers sceptical about climate alarmism - a non-random sample, but encouraging nevertheless

2011-11-23T15:10:00.003Z

From one of those online polls that inevitably suffers from self-selection by respondents, we see these encouraging results about school pupils, parents, and teachers being sceptical about 'climate change' (which I am interpreting as the short-hand used by activists to denote 'OMG we are in trouble, man-made CO2 is going to wreck everything - i.e. climate alarmism' rather than the literal meaning which is no more than a platitude):

Pity about the 'aministrators', but I guess they are just protecting their jobs, or at least their ears from the tirade that any activist teacher het-up about CO2 would probably subject them to.

The display above is from a post at the USA's National Science Teachers Association site: http://nsta.org/publications/news/story.aspx?id=59035 . There are no claims there that the results are representative of any more than the opinions of those who chose to respond to their online poll. That's good. And I couldn't find any report of how many actually responded, and what fraction they may be of their membership, and that's not so good.. But no matter, this is just a chunk of data that gives a peek into the view of some members of the NSTA. Since I'd like to stay cheerful, I have picked out and reproduced below those quotes from the examples given which I happen to find unambiguously encouraging. So this is a chunk of opinion that has been doubly selected!

I believe that “climate change” education is used to indict western civilization of false[ly]-manufactured crimes. Most of what the general news media and the education establishment insist upon as true science is simply not. Also, the numerous incidents of researchers altering data and cherry-picking sensor locations in order to influence data have left the United Nations’ and other groups’ theories and claims discredited and untrustworthy.
—Other, Middle School, High School, Ohio

As an educator in the field of science for 10 years, I am myself still very skeptical...I see too many dollar signs involved in this indoctrination.
—Educator, Middle School, Oklahoma

I am teaching my students that there is little to no evidence that climate change is [hu]manmade and that the reason that it is such a big deal is because of the money that is being exchanged in order for scientists to support the idea.
—Educator, Middle School, New York

Poor science on the climate change and obvious falsification of data as shown in the “Climategate” memos...Present side-by-side presentations: Give Al Gore two days, and I do a counterpoint on one day.
—Educator, High School, Kansas

Politically based, not science based…students either believe [humans are] the evil-doer[s] of all that happens in this world, or they disbelieve in global warming.
—Educator, Middle School, California

Sadly, there are at least as many discouraging quotes. OK, here's just one to show what I mean:

Also there is no debate among scientists about the cause; the only “debate” is among the media and “scientists” working for the oil industry…The media lies.
—Educator, Middle School, Florida

So what is encouraging? It is merely that there are some teachers, parents, and pupils out there who have not been hoodwinked by the alarmism. A well-designed sample-survey in this area would be very welcome, but who would do it? Who would allow it in their school? Not those 'administrators' I suspect! After all, perhaps the views now widely labelled 'sceptical' are in fact in a clear majority overall, and would actually deserve the label 'sensible'.

h/t: Tom Nelson

Some things to do to help resist CAGW-scaremongering in schools

2011-11-15T17:59:00.007Z

I am going to be devoting most of my time to other work for the next four months or so, and I expect to post a lot less often than I'd like to here. In case any readers are looking for ideas on what they might do to help with the chores of getting egregious materials on climate out of schools and elsewhere, I've been compiling a little list. Here it is, in no particular order and based on no profound analysis of the possibilities - I've just dusted down and spruced-up a 'to-do' list of my own:

(1) Investigating 2 sites: Project Genie and Kids Club Zilla

Shortly after I started this blog last year, I noted 3 possible projects in one of my early posts:

‘a) Schools Low Carbon Day: http://www.cooltheworld.co.uk/low_carbon_day.php Apparently well-intentioned initiative, but of course based on smoke and mirrors.

b) Genie: http://www.projectgenie.org.uk/ An overblown scare site based on notion that carbon (dioxide) is a genie buried in the earth, one which we are releasing to our imminent danger and disadvantage.

c) Zilla: http://www.kidsclubzilla.com/index.html I am not sure how current this site is. It is spooky, of unclear origin, and may be a money-making scam taking advantage of the CO2 scare.I have heard that such sites appear after major disasters are in the news. Well, the IPCC is certainly one of those.’

Of these, the first one seems to have disappeared. I am not so sure about the other two. Some investigation to find out more about their current state might be worthwhile. Are they still active? If so, what are they doing? Do they matter much?

(2) Organising the Pages. I have 5 ‘pages’ on the blog which are in very poor shape.

They could do with some organisation, and ideas for further development. The five topics are:

Any ideas for material to include in them? Any ideas for improving their layout, or making them more useful?

(3) Making better use of Delicious. I have been occasionally adding links to the ClimateLessons collection on Delicious. This too needs a good tidy, and ideas for making more use of it. My main idea when starting it was to provide convenient access to references useful when Fisking silly climate materials. One of the key tag-words is ‘rebuttal’ (or ‘Rebuttal’, or even ‘rebutal’ – see what I mean about tidying!).

(4) Investigating the British Council climate propaganda efforts. What are they up to? When did it start? Who is driving it, and why? It seemed to die down (http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110610/full/news.2011.364.html ) but look at this report on Biased-BBC: Andrew Mitchell, Cameron's international development secretary, has announced this weekend (reported in the Sunday Times P6, so not linkable)a £90m grant for the BBC World Service Trust (WST). This, as I have written before, is a body whose main purpose is to brainwash the developing world about eco loonery, and already spends millions doing so, with projects like this:

‘The major objective of Africa Talks Climate is to identify the entry points to engage, inform and empower Africans in local, national and international conversations about climate change. To achieve this, the initiative will collate opinions and then amplify the voices of people at all levels of society. "Climate change is the defining issue of our age," said Peter Upton, Country Director for the British Council in Nigeria. "Climate in Africa is one of the most important issues that all people and governments will face. Africa will be one of the most affected regions but has done the least to contribute to the problem. ‘

Source: http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/2011/11/not-conservative.html#comments

(note added 14 Dec 2011:cg2 emails reveal BC zealots spending UK tax money on creating media pundits)

(5) Review, or even Fisk a part of a website or booklet or DVD aimed at children or at teachers. My series of posts on ‘Low Carbon Day for Schools’ works through just one paragraph on the original site in a series of 8 posts ending in this one (http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-would-you-believe-this-8-of-8-and.html)

http://xkcd.com/386/

Here is an example of Fisking some particularly silly remarks on climate: http://adventuresintimetravel.com/2011/05/27/hari-watch-purple-prose-alert/

Here is an entire book Fisking another book on climate: ‘The Weather Makers Re-Examined’ by D Weston Allen (Irenic Publications, Australia). ‘The Weather Makers’ being a book of climate alarmism by a Tim Flannery, notorious in Australia for his over-the-top forecasts of doom.

There are a great many booklets aimed at young children. One I came across recently is ‘Why Are the Ice Caps Melting’, and there is scarcely a page of text in it without something objectionable. Ordering one such book and doing a review of it would be good practice for anyone wanting to cut their teeth at Fisking.

(6) Investigate what is going on at Science Learning Centres, e.g. this one in the north-east of England (https://www.sciencelearningcentres.org.uk/centres/north-east/climate-change-schools-project/introduction ). Climate seems to be dominating this science centre, presumably because that is where it has been easiest to get funding. But what are they doing to the children? Information about their materials and messages would be useful. Appears to take AGW as a given, and concentrate on saving energy. Yet energy is not in short supply, and nagging children about it seems unduly negative and destructive of their spirits.

(7) Find out more about what the UK Youth Climate Coalition might be doing in schools or elsewhere. It looks like a group of youngsters having a whale of time, tapping into funds, jetting around the world, and generally feeling like they are saving us all. But what is it based on? What foundation is there for this proselytising? Have they given any deep thought to anything at all? Does it matter much since they will either grow up or move on to another fad within a few years? Would they benefit from therapy?

(8)Ditto for Climate Week. What has been happening to these youngsters? Such as this one: so young, but has served on Obama’s election campaign, advised the UK government, directed academic studies, and more. They have clearly been convinced and energised about climate change (it would be interesting to try to find out what it is that they have found most convincing by way of evidence), and are finding lots of things to do, committees to join, conferences to attend, initiatives to pursue.

(9)Scotland seems heading into economic and intellectual swamps along Californian lines, as evidenced by the political push for carbon reduction and renewables. The alarmists’ penchant for getting to the kids is also well underway, and would be a worthy topic of investigation. One organisation involved is ‘Eco-schools Scotland’.

(10) Take a Global View. This site might be a place to start: http://climatechangeeducation.org/international/index.html in order to learn more about international and national activities aimed at schoolchildren. This organisation would also bear checking in case there is anything unsatisfactory going on: http://globe.gov/about

(11)Getting information to interested politicians, e.g. note the straight talking here in Australia: http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/2011/05/minchin-offensive-nonsense-from-known-global-warming-alarmists/ Politicians do need information for their ‘soundbites’, and some indication that there is appreciable support ‘out there’ for viewpoints contrary to that of ‘the establishment’ on climate.

There is to be a meeting in Westminster on 30^th November involving several distinguished critics of climate alarmism and/or the IPCC ('The Climate Change Act Reconsidered' starting 1pm in Westminster Palace or Portcullis House). Can you persuade your MP to attend?

(12)Study some aspect of climate in more detail – make it your speciality to be familiar with what the experts and others are saying about it. Plenty to choose from: polar bears, glaciers, hurricanes, floods, droughts, etc, etc. Get hold of data yourself and do some plots in Excel to become more familiar with it.

There are lots of examples here using Excel, albeit by a statistician but anyone competent with spreadsheets could reproduce much of it: http://gustofhotair.blogspot.com/. That link is for Australian temperature data – here is someone who was inspired by it to take a look at Canadian data in a similar way: http://cdnsurfacetemps.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/why-mean-temp-is-meaningless/

Informal data analysis can help stimulate ideas for further tests. Here are more examples: as in here: http://reasonabledoubtclimate.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/texas-winters-hayhoe-warming-effect/

Added 28 Nov, 2011: Here is an example of a professor of atmospheric science being fatuous. The analysis shows how easy it can be to refute those driven by dogma and the momentum of an all-consuming 'cause': http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/katharine-and-the-100-year-rain-events/#more-331

(13) Further to (12). Prepare to write to, or in, your favourite newspaper and/or post comments at its web-version. First, of course, get a clear grasp of some aspect of climate that may come up – do not just parrot stuff from other sites, do some thinking, note-taking, and arithmetic on your own and see what views you form. Then, and only then, start sharing them. There are so many topics to choose from, so take care not to spread yourself too thinly. Just choosing one might be a good place to start. There is so much interlinking and overlap amongst topics that wherever you choose to start, you will find many avenues to follow as and when you feel ready to.

(14) Review in more detail the Welsh Climate Pack mentioned here: http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2011/09/welsh-schools-to-be-sent-scare-them.html

(15) Outreach from here. If you find a post in this blog that you like, then draw attention to it in some site or other forum where relevant people gather. I imagine most of my readers here are already convinced that some level of scepticism is in order about CO2 alarmism. I think that if there is any merit in a post, it would be best drawn to the attention of those who are most relevant to it, and who are unlikely to see it otherwise. For example, email details to any teacher you know – you don’t have to defend my ramblings, you might merely say they might be of interest or they caught your attention, and what does your contact think about it? I think there has been very little outreach from here, and that to me is a great failing.

(16) Find out more about what is going in your local schools. Do they still show ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ for example? Where in the curricula are climate change issues addressed, and how? Do outsiders, e.g. from corporations such as Greenpeace or WWF visit any of them? Do pupils get to hear about calmer views of climate? What do your nearby head teachers think about how best to include climate issues? You could extend this to finding out more about central government initiatives in this area. I suspect they have faded away dramatically with the change of government, but I don’t know for sure.

Now not many people read this blog (1,000 to 2,000 page view per month since July), so it should not be your first choice as an outlet for any of your work if you can find others. On the other hand, I'd be delighted if you want to make use of it. I still harbour hopes that one day it will be useful as a source of information for anyone actively engaged with this resistance effort against the wave of frightful propaganda about climate aimed at the young.

added 20 Nov 2011
(17) Design or develop climate lessons which would give schoolchildren valid and balanced insights into the climate system, into meteorology, and into the various implications of either. These are all interesting areas, and could provide material for very interesting and engaging classes, without any resort whatsoever to the cheap, immoral, and irresponsible device of scaremongering. The more such curricula there are, the quicker the transition to better scholastic standards in this area could be. A trickier, and more urgent, task would be to give thought to materials that could help those children already exposed to the shoddy science of alarmism and its possible manifestations just about anywhere in the curriculum. Such materials would also be of use to adults long past their schooldays but still damaged by their climate-related experiences in them. This website has a scattering of suggestions for '10-minute trainers' that could be used to expose alarmist nonsense - search on that topic to see at least half a dozen here. (added 6 Dev 2011 A useful compilation of of links to tutorial materials here: http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Debate.htm)

How to Get Expelled from School, a guide to climate change for pupils, parents and punters

2011-11-15T11:55:00.001Z

This does look promising!

'HOW TO GET EXPELLED FROM SCHOOL:
A guide to climate change for pupils, parents and punters

Ian Plimer
Foreword by Václav Klaus,
President of the Czech Republic

RELEASED DATE: November 2011

$29.95
ISBN: 978-1-921421-80-8
Paperback, (250 pages approx)

Are pupils, parents and the public being fed political propaganda on climate change? Now is your chance to find out. Professor Plimer gives 101 simple questions with answers for you to ask teachers, activists, journalists and politicians. The climate industry adjusts the temperature record and withholds raw data, computer codes and information from scrutiny. Computer predictions of a scary future don’t agree with measurements. Past natural climate changes have been larger and more rapid than the worst case predictions yet humans adapted. Is human-induced global warming the biggest financial and scientific scam in history? If it is, we will pay dearly.'

(h/t Phillip Bratby, comment posted on 'Unthreaded' Nov 15, 2011 at 11:40am at Bishop Hill)

This is how it should be: thoughtful climate science in a high school

2011-11-08T14:38:00.003Z

Roger Pielke Snr maintains an excellent - informative, civil, thoughtful, substantial - blog on climate science. He recently met with pupils at an American high school, and reports on the question and answer session here. (hat-tip: Tom Nelson)

Q&A For Climate For High School Students

What a contrast to some of the material and motivations I have reported on in this site. Let me pick out a few highlights to encourage you to read the original post:

'In addition to these human climate forcings, natural climate forcings and feedbacks are also quite important. We need to consider these natural effects as clearly the climate is much more complex than is commonly reported by the media and even the IPCC. For example, the global average temperature anomalies are cooling!'

'Since the CO2 effect is but one of a number of first order climate influences, as discussed above, I have concluded we know much less about the future climate than is claimed by the IPCC and the media. This does not mean we should not be concerned as to how much CO2 we insert into the atmosphere, but the claims that we know its effect on the climate is very much overstated, in my view.'

'Finally, in terms of climate metrics, I encourage your class to research yourselves from orginal data what is the current status of these metrics. You would be surprised how many of them do not follow the behavior predicted by the multi-decadal global climate model predictions, and being reported in the news.'

Pielke puts most 'climate educators' to shame with his basic scientific honesty, not to mention his straightforward prose. When, as must surely happen one day, our curricula are cleansed of the IPCC-inspired hyperbole and scare stories, we know there are some, such as Pielke, who could fill those precious places in the curricula with decent science. They would seek to inform and inspire the young, rather than frighten them into 'political activism' for a soul-destroying and economically ruinous cause. A cause which is, in my view, riding on the back of speculative and wholly inadequate computer models.

Note added 7 Dec 2011: Bob Tisdale has stumbled across a criticism on the SkepticalScience blog of Pielke's Q&A reported on above. He has taken the trouble to analyse the criticism, and, as you would expect, shows it to be vexatious (by misdirection) and lacking in substance. He summarises it as follows: 'Yet again, SkepticalScience has highlighted their inability to comprehend a topic of discussion, or has illustrated their need to mislead their readers, or both.'.

Climate Classroom Projects: testing the sagacity of the Royal Society

2011-11-06T16:56:00.000Z

http://4umi.com/swift/gulliver/laputa/5

The regrettable participation of the Royal Society in the spreading of alarm over climate was partially corrected by their revised, and far less inflammatory statement on climate issued in 2010.

The new statement is full of cautions and provisos, but two of the least ambiguous remarks are to be found in paragraphs 45 and 49 relating to sea levels (I have added the emboldening):

‘45 Because of the thermal expansion of the ocean, it is very likely that for many centuries the rate of global sea-level rise will be at least as large as the rate of 20 cm per century that has been observed over the past century. Paragraph 49 discusses the additional, but more uncertain, contribution to sea-level rise from the melting of land ice.

49 There is currently insufficient understanding of the enhanced melting and retreat of the ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica to predict exactly how much the rate of sea level rise will increase above that observed in the past century (see paragraph 45) for a given temperature increase. Similarly, the possibility of large changes in the circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean cannot be assessed with confidence. The latter limits the ability to predict with confidence what changes in climate will occur in Western Europe.’

Project 1: what is actually happening to sea levels?

Recently sea levels have been falling in quite a pronounced way (Climate4You has graphical summaries).

The projected rise in sea level by the year 2100 using a 3-year running mean has fallen to 22cm in the year 2010, and the data suggests it is likely be below 20cm shortly. If the recent drops continue, then the naïve extrapolation will in due course be for a fall in sea level by the year 2100.

A report of a recent study using data from an EU satellite, claims a naïve extrapolation of only 8 cm rise by the year 2100.

The C3 site has more leads.

Project 2: what is actually happening to the big ice sheets?

As for the ‘the enhanced melting and retreat of the ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica’ of paragraph 49, that should provide scope for another informative class project. Plenty of leads on the topic can be found here: http://www.c3headlines.com/are-antarcticgreenland-about-to-totally-melt/ . For example headlines such as those below could be checked for veracity and relevance:

# New Research Out of Greenland Proves Stability of Ice Sheet Over The Last 2 Decades

# New Antarctica Research: The IPCC "Consensus" Science Is Turned Topsy-Turvy

# IPCC Science Wrong: Current Antarctic Climate Conditions Are Not Unprecedented, Peer-Research Determines

Both of these projects could be sustained over many years to come, with different waves of pupils adding to the collective insights and preparing their own summaries from the latest data. The link to the Royal Society’s claims will add a topical touch.

Cultural aside. If you or any of your pupils have a literary bent, you might enjoy a (re-) reading of Gulliver’s Travels to accompany these projects. Here is a commentary on part of them by Shirley Galloway:

‘The main focus of social criticism in the voyage to Laputa is on intellectuals, such as scholars, philosophers, and scientists, who often get lost in theoretical abstractions and conceptions to the exclusion of the more pragmatic aspects of life, in direct contrast to the practical Brobdingnagians. Many critics feel Swift was satirizing "the strange experiments of the scientists of the Royal Society," but may also have been warning his readers against "the political projectors and speculators of the time," (Davis 149-150). The Laputians excel at theoretical mathematics, but they can't build houses where the walls are straight and the corners are square. Instead, they constantly worry about when the sun will burn out and whether a comet will collide with the earth. This misuse of reason is hilariously elaborated on in Chapters five and six, where the various experiments occurring at the Grand Academy of Lagado are described. Of course, the point is highlighted as Gulliver professes his sincere admiration for such projects as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers and building houses from the roof down. The satire in Voyage three attacks both the deficiency of common sense and the consequences of corrupt judgment (Quintana, 317).’

I guess modern Laputians would excel at computer modeling, and be constantly worrying about when CO2 will bring catastrophe. Oh for a modern Swift to warn us against ‘political projectors and speculators’!

Alarming the Children: creating climate activists in Africa

2011-11-03T11:52:00.003Z

Outside of religion, outside of totalitarian regimes, has there ever been such targeting of the young to win recruits for a cause such as we are seeing being used by climate campaigners around the world? With fear as the spur to catch their attention: you are going to be doomed/suffer greatly/kill polar bears/etc etc unless you, your parents, your teachers, your communities, your businesses, your governments follow the party line - a line which calls for weakening your society's ability to respond to climate variation by, for example, subsidising windfarms and discouraging more reliable and less expensive ways to generate electricity.

By what stretch of a tortured imagination, can it be found desirable to abandon the basic adult responsibility of protecting the young from being terrified of their future? The fact that this abandonment is based ultimately on computer models that can be tweaked to produce anything the owners of them want to see [apart from verisimilitude] is even more jaw-dropping.
(text and link in brackets added 4 Nov 11)

Here it is happening in Africa. Read this extract from a press release by UNICEF dated 31 October 2011:

'UNICEF urges media to hear the voices of children on climate change

PRETORIA, 31 October 2011 - As South Africa prepares for the 17th Conference of Parties (COP 17) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban from 28 November to 9 December 2011, UNICEF is urging media to consult with children on what they believe to be the key issues surrounding climate change, its impact on the children of South Africa, and what role children can play to address climate change.
A new study commissioned by UNICEF in partnership with the Department of Environmental Affairs and the Department of Women, Children and People with Disabilities, to be launched in mid-November 2011, highlights the importance of child participation in designing effective responses to climate change.
The study ‘The Impact of Climate Change on Children in South Africa’ highlights the expected impact of climate change on children’s health, education, nutrition, safety and access to adequate housing and sanitation in South Africa – both directly and indirectly. However, in spite of their increased vulnerability, children cannot be viewed simply as victims of climate change. Children need to be – and have a right to be – actively involved in the discussions and planning of mitigation and adaptation strategies, as well as policies and plans by various levels of government.
The study also reveals that there are a number of existing initiatives in South Africa through which children are participating in the climate change agenda. These could be strengthened to create a solid foundation for effective participation by children on climate change issues that can feed into, and strengthen policy and national response.'

(hat-tip Messenger for this link: http://newnostradamusofthenorth.blogspot.com/2011/11/unicef-children-should-participate-in.html )

Further reading
(1) Creating 'little climate activists' in UK schools

http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2011/02/classroom-climate-conditioning-at-work.html

(2) Something similar in Canada
http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2011/03/canadian-climate-campaigners-how-to.html

(3) Why do they pick on children? Some thoughts here:

http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2011/04/not-just-another-brick-in-wall-hey.html

(4) How much harm can they cause? Examples here:

http://www.eco-imperialism.com/main.php

(5) Opposition in the USA to alarm-indoctrination in schools: http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2011/08/propaganda-pantomime-of-climate.html

Also includes this quote from the UK:
‘This week, I met a 17‑year-old pupil from a girls’ public school that, in the past, has been more famous for turning out Sloaney husband-hunters than for filling its pupils with useless scientific facts. But the stereotype is out of date, it seems. The GCSE syllabus ranges far and wide, taking in the physics, chemistry, biology, geopolitics, economics and ethics of climate change. In English lessons, girls “debate” (ie, heartily endorse) the proposition that global warming will kill us all. And guess what topic has been chosen for French conversation?
But parents shouldn’t worry that their girls will turn into eco-loons. “Honestly,” says my informant, “we’re all, like, sooo bored with climate change. I can’t wait to leave school to escape.”’

There’s hope yet!

Something for the classroom wall: Central England not part of the G in CAGW?

2011-11-01T17:38:00.000Z

Source: http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a7c87805970b-pi

What is so special about central England that it should escape the man-made 'global' warming we have been told is so worrisome that we must do all we can to destroy industrial civilisation, including deliberate efforts to scare children into becoming 'little climate activists'? The projected catastrophe seems to be passing England by - that part of the sceptred isle can be seen to be enjoying a modest, and pleasant warming excursion of a kind it has seen many times before. At least until the recent summers ill-suited for barbeques despite the fervent hopes of Met Office modellers, and recent winters well-suited for cross-country skiing.

Nothing seems extraordinary in this temperature series, one which shows a modest trend and a lot of irregular variation about it. The rising CO2 emissions look quite irrelevant. There is clearly no basis here for alarm. We need the services of computer specialists willing to speak as oracles of doom in order to provide enough substance for political activists to spin an entire body - the IPCC, numerous governments, and a great many in the mass media, into severe agitation. Sadly, a great many teachers have been caught up in the swirl, and of course sadder still, a great many children have been told their societies, and of course the polar bears, are all but doomed. Unless they obey, and get their parents to obey, and get their societies to obey, the diktats of those political activists.

Hat-tip for drawing attention to the graphic: Tony Brown.

His WUWT article today on climate (esp temperature) history is well worth reading in its own right. He concludes:
'The globe appears to have been gently warming for 400 years- with numerous reversals and cold periods interspersed with warm ones. Within this overall trend can be discerned regions running counter cyclical to the warming trend, as was observed in the article ‘In search of cooling trends’.
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/in-search-of-cooling-trends/
We estimated around one third of all stations to be cooling, a figure now endorsed by the Berkeley study. The assertion regarding lack of climate variability cited at the top of this article by two of the most prestigious climate organizations cannot be supported-there were periods around as warm as today as well as very cold periods, demonstrating great variability, no doubt there were also areas running counter cyclical to the prevailing trend, as can be seen today.'

Something to amuse you and then your senior pupils: a potted history of climate-alarmism, leaving the BEST to last

2011-10-25T18:03:00.014+01:00

The recent spinning of the BEST results to claim they refute the arguments of sceptics by merely showing that the widely used global climate records do indeed show a modest warming in the 20th century is but the latest attempt at mass deception by those who have found advantage in climate alarmism. Here, from Maggie's Farm, is a trenchant view of it all:

Global Warming 4.0

'I have a tough observation test for you (if you dare to take it, and I highly recommend you don't), but first a bit of history, written in my usual calm, clear, objective, pusillanimously pseudonymous style.

Global Warming 1.0 was the original theme (see accompanying photograph taken from Moon Base Alpha), basically launched by NASA's James Hansen as NASA began its decades-long plan to bankrupt the American economy by building a completely worthless trillion dollar space station as well as destroy entire nations as witnessed by the South Seas island nations who have been told that their islands will soon be inundated with water from the melting ice pack and have thus abandoned any future plans for their nations' growth. Well done, NASA, well done.

Global Warming 2.0 was when it was realized that, dammit, the earth wasn't warming as quite as fast as it should, and the hurricanes we got clobbered with in 2004 and 2005 turned out to be the predicted results of typical hurricane patterns, not to mention that the hurricanes then had the temerity to go away in 2006 — and what a disappointment that was. As a result, 'climate change' was created to cover more bases.

Global Warming 2.1 to 2.8 was when we saw the massive expansion of things that were going to affected by the new, improved 'climate change', and this was especially effective because you can work in both directions, hotter and colder.

Global Warming 2.9 was when earthquakes were deemed to be the result of man-made global warming. This one was given its own special sub-version number so future historians will be able to pinpoint with precision the apex of mankind's stupidity.

Global Warming 3.0 was a little more insidious, in while it claimed that, yes, global warming was entirely man's fault, we didn't need to take such drastic measures as those espoused by the Kyoto Protocol and, later, Cap & Trade. This version was spearheaded by Danish video rock star Bjorn Lomborg. It was very seductive to the fence-sitters, and Tigerhawk, for one, took it seriously, as did other bloggers whose names you might recognize.

All of which brings us to today... '

[see the article link for the rest, which includes a link to an article in The Guardian in which 4.0 first sees the light of day.]

Notes added later on 25/10/11:
(1) Dr Ball has interesting things to say about the BEST study:

'The fact they even attempted the project indicates lack of knowledge or understanding of the inadequacies of the data set in space or time or subsequent adjustments. Lamb spoke to the problem when he established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU). On page 203 of his autobiography he said,

“When the Climatic Research Unit was founded, it was clear that the first and greatest need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climate in times before any side effects of human activities could well be important. A worldwide record was needed particularly on the time scale of human history a project which surprisingly no other body had attempted in any coordinated way.” “We are living in a time when the glamour of the much more expensive work of the mathematical modeling laboratories, and the tempting prospect of their theoretical predictions are stealing the limelight. The confidence generally characterizing the pronouncements from those quarters has since given way to more cautious statements in later years. It does not seem to have been widely recognized that the theoreticians work was proceeding without adequate prior study (or any sure understanding) of the sometimes drastic swings of climate that have occurred over periods from a few years or decades to some centuries, often settling in abruptly and some of them still unexplained.”

The BEST study confirms Lamb’s concerns. It adds nothing to advancing the understanding of the degree of climate change. Until that is adequately defined and described there is no hope of determining the underlying causes and mechanisms of change. The failure to understand the complete inadequacy of the existing temperature record is troubling. It makes it appear that there is an incompetence or a political motive, or both.'
(2) James Delingpole is even more damning:
'What is going on is exactly the kind of utterly reprehensible dishonesty and trickery I anatomise more thoroughly in Watermelons. The Warmists lost the battle over "the science" long ago; that's why the best they can do now is resort to the kind of risible semantic ruse like this deliberate conflation of "global warming" with "man made global warming".'
(3) Willis Eschenbach provides a more technical assessment (but still a very accessible one):
'I remind folks again that the hype about BEST showing skeptics are wrong is just that. Most folks knew already that the world has been generally warming for hundreds of years, and BEST’s results in that regard were no surprise. BEST showed nothing about whether humans are affecting the climate, nor could it have done so. There are still large unresolved issues in the land temperature record which BEST has not clarified or solved. The jury is out on the BEST results, and it is only in part because they haven’t even gone through peer review.'
Note added 27 October 2011
This link to Nature may not last long since the comment by Prof Singer in it conflicts with and criticises their notorious stance with respect to climate science.
Extract:
'But unlike the land surface, the atmosphere has shown no warming trend, either over land or over ocean — according to satellites and independent data from weather balloons. This indicates to me that there is something very wrong with the land surface data. And did you know that climate models, run on super-computers, all insist that the atmosphere must warm faster than the surface? And so does theory.
And finally, we have non-thermometer temperature data from so-called 'proxies': tree rings, ice cores, ocean sediments, stalagmites. They don?t show any global warming since 1940!
The BEST (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature) results in no way confirm the scientifically discredited Hockeystick graph, which had been so eagerly adopted by climate alarmists. In fact, the Hockeystick authors never published their post-1978 temperatures in their 1998 paper in Nature, or since. The reason for hiding them? It's likely that those proxy data show no warming either. Why don't you ask them?
One last word: You evidently haven?t read the four scientific BEST papers, submitted for peer review. There, the Berkeley scientists disclaim knowing the cause of the temperature increase reported by their project. They conclude, however: 'The human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated.' I commend them for their honesty and skepticism.'

( I have corrected some punctuation typos, esp. where '?' was printed instead of apostrophes, and I added the emboldening at the end.)

Note added 30 October 2011. A useful overview in the Mail on Sunday:

(note that the vertical scales are slightly different, and the horizontal scales are very different between the charts)
Extract:
'But today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.
Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.
Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.
Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago.'

(hat tip: Bishop Hill , where some discussion of this newspaper article can be found)

Note added 7 Nov 11.. Report of very poor data quality in the BEST study: http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/06/best-data-quality/

A Perspective on Climate Knowledge: Geophysicist Deming speaks out as a 'Denier'

2011-10-20T11:03:00.005+01:00

Any teacher wondering whether to take issue with the conventional, or establishment, view of the causes of climate variation might find the following essay helpful as a spur to their own reflections and for broadening their own background knowledge of the subject (hat tip: Tom Nelson's blog). Deming is unusual in being willing to accept the 'denier' epithet. His approach may well help to undermine the malevolent intent of those who deploy it. A key part of his position is based on the difficulty of defining, and measuring, an 'average temperature' for our planet. Given that climate discussions are often around actual or projected changes of less than one Celsius degree in 'average temperature, however defined', his concern is a very reasonable one.

Why I Deny Global Warming

by David Deming

I'm a denier for several reasons. There is no substantive evidence that the planet has warmed significantly or that any significant warming will occur in the future. If any warming does occur, it likely will be concentrated at higher latitudes and therefore be beneficial. Climate research has largely degenerated into pathological science, and the coverage of global warming in the media is tendentious to the point of being fraudulent. Anyone who is an honest and competent scientist must be a denier.

Have you ever considered how difficult it is to take the temperature of the planet Earth? What temperature will you measure? The air? The surface of the Earth absorbs more than twice as much incident heat from the Sun than the air. But if you measure the temperature of the surface, what surface are you going to measure? The solid Earth or the oceans? There is twice as much water as land on Earth. If you decide to measure water temperature, at what depth will you take the measurements? How will the time scale on which the deep ocean mixes with the shallow affect your measurements? And how, pray tell, will you determine what the average water temperature was for the South Pacific Ocean a hundred years ago? How will you combine air, land, and sea temperature measurements? Even if you use only meteorological measurements of air temperature, how will you compensate for changes in latitude, elevation, and land use?

Determining a mean planetary temperature is not straightforward, but an extremely complicated problem. Even the best data are suspect. Anthony Watts and his colleagues have surveyed 82.5 percent of stations in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network. They have found – shockingly – that over 70 percent of these stations are likely to be contaminated by errors greater than 2 deg C [3.6 deg F]. Of the remaining stations, 21.5 percent have inherent errors greater than 1 deg C. The alleged degree of global warming over the past 150 years is less than 1 deg C. Yet even in a technologically advanced country like the US, the inherent error in over 90 percent of the surveyed meteorological stations is greater than the putative signal. And these errors are not random, but systematically reflect a warming bias related to urbanization. Watts has documented countless instances of air temperature sensors located next to air conditioning vents or in the middle of asphalt parking lots. A typical scenario is that a temperature sensor that was in the middle of a pasture a hundred years ago is now surrounded by a concrete jungle. Urbanization has been a unidirectional process. It is entirely plausible – even likely – that all of the temperature rise that has been inferred from the data is an artifact that reflects the growth of urban heat islands.

The "denier" is portrayed as a person who refuses to accept the plain evidence of his senses. But in fact it is the alarmist who doesn't know what they are talking about. The temperature of the Earth and how it has varied over the past 150 years is poorly constrained. The person who thinks otherwise does so largely because they have no comprehension of the science. Most of these people have never done science or thought about the inherent difficulties and uncertainties involved.

And what is "global warming" anyway? As long ago as the fifth century BC, Socrates pointed out that intelligible definitions are a necessary precursor to meaningful discussions. The definition of the term "global warming" shifts with the context of the discussion. If you deny global warming, then you have denied the existence of the greenhouse effect, a reproducible phenomenon that can be studied analytically in the laboratory. But if you oppose political action, then global warming metamorphoses into a nightmarish and speculative planetary catastrophe. Coastal cities sink beneath a rising sea, species suffer from wholesale extinctions, and green pastures are turned into deserts of choking hot sand.

In fact, so-called "deniers" are not "deniers" but skeptics. Skeptics do not deny the existence of the greenhouse effect. Holding all other factors constant, the mean planetary air temperature ought to rise as the atmosphere accumulates more anthropogenic CO2. Christopher Monckton recently reviewed the pertinent science and concluded that a doubling of CO2 should result in a temperature increase of about 1 deg C. If this temperature increase mirrors those in the geologic past, most of it will occur at high latitudes. These areas will become more habitable for man, plants, and other animals. Biodiversity will increase. Growing seasons will lengthen. Why is this a bad thing?

Any temperature increase over 1 deg C for a doubling of CO2 must come from a positive feedback from water vapor. Water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas in Earth's atmosphere, and warm air holds more water than cold air. The theory is that an increased concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere will lead to a positive feedback that amplifies the warming from CO2 by as much as a factor of three to five. But this is nothing more that speculation. Water vapor also leads to cloud formation. Clouds have a cooling effect. At the current time, no one knows if the feedback from water vapor will be positive or negative.

Global warming predictions cannot be tested with mathematical models. It is impossible to validate computer models of complex natural systems. The only way to corroborate such models is to compare model predictions with what will happen in a hundred years. And one such result by itself won't be significant because of the possible compounding effects of other variables in the climate system. The experiment will have to repeated over several one-hundred year cycles. In other words, the theory of catastrophic global warming cannot be tested or empirically corroborated in a human time frame.

It is hardly conclusive to argue that models are correct because they have reproduced past temperatures. I'm sure they have. General circulation models have so many degrees of freedom that it is possible to endlessly tweak them until the desired result is obtained. Hindsight is always 20-20. This tells us exactly nothing about a model's ability to accurately predict what will happen in the future.

The entire field of climate science and its coverage in the media is tendentious to the point of being outright fraudulent. Why is it that every media report on CO2 – an invisible gas – is invariably accompanied by a photograph of a smokestack emitting particulate matter? Even the cover of Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, shows a smokestack. Could it be that its difficult to get people worked up about an invisible, odorless gas that is an integral component of the photosynthetic cycle? A gas that is essential to most animal and plant life on Earth? A gas that is emitted by their own bodies through respiration? So you have to deliberately mislead people by showing pictures of smoke to them. Showing one thing when you're talking about another is fraud. If the case for global warming alarmism is so settled, so conclusive, so irrefutable...why is it necessary to repeatedly resort to fraud?

A few years ago it was widely reported that the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause poison ivy to grow faster. But of course carbon dioxide causes almost all plants to grow faster. And nearly all of these plants have beneficial human uses. Carbon dioxide fertilizes hundreds or thousands of human food sources. More CO2 means trees grow faster. So carbon dioxide promotes reforestation and biodiversity. Its good for the environment. But none of this was reported. Instead, the media only reported that global warming makes poison ivy grow faster. And this is but one example of hundreds or thousands of such misleading reports. If sea ice in the Arctic diminishes, it is cited as irrefutable proof of global warming. But if sea ice in the Antarctic increases, it is ignored. Even cold weather events are commonly invoked as evidence for global warming. People living in the future will look back and wonder how we could have been so delusional.

For the past few years I have remained silent concerning the Climategate emails. But what they revealed is what many of us already knew was going on: global warming research has largely degenerated into what is known as pathological science, a "process of wishful data interpretation." When I testified before the US Senate in 2006, I stated that a major climate researcher told me in 1995 that "we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period." The existence and global nature of the Medieval Warm Period had been substantiated by literally hundreds of research articles published over decades. But it had to be erased from history for ideological reasons. A few years later the infamous "hockey stick" appeared. The "hockey stick" was a revisionist attempt to rewrite the temperature history of the last thousand years. It has been discredited as being deeply flawed.

In one Climategate email, a supposed climate scientist admitted to "hiding the decline." In other words, hiding data that tended to disprove his ideological agenda. Another email described how alarmists would try to keep critical manuscripts from being published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. One of them wrote, we'll "keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Gee. If the climate science that validates global warming is so unequivocal, why is it necessary to work behind the scenes to suppress dissent? You "doth protest too much."

As described in my book, Science and Technology in World History: The Ancient World and Classical Civilization, systematic science began with the invocation of naturalism by Greek philosophers and Hippocratic physicians c. 600-400 BC. But the critical attitude adopted by the Greeks was as important as naturalism. Students were not only allowed to criticize their teachers, but were encouraged to do so. From its beginnings in Greek natural philosophy, science has been an idealistic and dispassionate search for truth. As Plato explained, anyone who could point out a mistake "shall carry off the palm, not as an enemy, but as a friend." This is one reason that scientists enjoy so much respect. The public assumes that a scientist's pursuit of truth is unencumbered by political agendas.

But science does not come easy to men. "Science," George Sarton reminded us, "is a joykiller." The proper conduct of science requires a high degree of intellectual discipline and rigor. Scientists are supposed to use multiple working hypotheses and sort through these by the processes of corroboration and falsification. The most valuable evidence is that which tends to falsify or disprove a theory. A scientist, by the very definition of his activity, must be skeptical. A scientist engaged in a dispassionate search for truth elevates the critical – he does not suppress it. Knowledge begins with skepticism and ends with conceit.
Finally, I'm happy to be known as a "denier" because the label of "denier" says nothing about me, but everything about the person making the charge. Scientific theories are never denied or believed, they are only corroborated or falsified. Scientific knowledge, by its very nature, is provisional and subject to revision. The provisional nature of scientific knowledge is a necessary consequence of the epistemological basis of science. Science is based on observation. We never have all the data. As our body of data grows, our theories and ideas must necessarily evolve. Anyone who thinks scientific knowledge is final and complete must necessarily endorse as a corollary the absurd proposition that the process of history has stopped.

A scientific theory cannot be "denied." Only a belief can be denied. The person who uses the word "denier" thus reveals that they hold global warming as a belief, not a scientific theory. Beliefs are the basis of revealed religion. Revelations cannot be corroborated or studied in the laboratory, so religions are based on dogmatic beliefs conservatively held. Religions tend to be closed systems of belief that reject criticism. But the sciences are open systems of knowledge that welcome criticism. I'm a scientist, and therefore I must happily confess to being a denier.

October 19, 2011

David Deming [send him mail] is a geophysicist, associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma, and author of the books Science and Technology in World History, Vols. 1 & 2.

Source: http://lewrockwell.com/orig9/deming6.1.1.html

Trashy Climate 'Science' Can Be Exposed in the Classroom: Watts Shows the Way

2011-10-19T14:21:00.001+01:00

Replicating Al Gore’s Climate 101 video experiment shows that his “high school physics” could never work as advertised

The title links to a post by Anthony Watts in which he describes the results he got when he tried to replicate a 'high-school physics' experiment promoted by Albert Gore as part of a recent propaganda initiative.

He writes:

'Readers may recall my previous essay where I pointed out how Mr. Gore’s Climate 101 Video, used in his “24 hours of climate reality”, had some serious credibility issues with editing things to make it appear as if they had actually performed the experiment, when they clearly did not. It has taken me awhile to replicate the experiment. Delays were a combination of acquisition and shipping problems, combined with my availability since I had to do this on nights and weekends. I worked initially using the original techniques and equipment, and I’ve replicated the Climate 101 experiment in other ways using improved equipment. '

This work by Watts was triggered by provocative remarks by Gore as well as by evidence that his video showing the experiment had been doctored:

'[Gore's] specific claim was:

“The deniers claim that it’s some kind of hoax and that the global scientific community is lying to people,” he said. “It’s not a hoax, it’s high school physics.” - Al Gore in an interview with MNN 9/14/2011

So easy a high school kid can do it. Right?
Bill Nye, in his narration at 0:48 in the video says:

You can replicate this effect yourself in a simple lab experiment, here’s how.

…and at 1:10 in the video Nye says:

Within minutes you will see the temperature of the bottle with the carbon dioxide in it rising faster and higher.

So, I decided to find out if that was true and if anyone could really replicate that claim, or if this was just more stagecraft chicanery. I was betting that nobody on Gore’s production team actually did this experiment, or if they did do it, it wasn’t successful, because otherwise, why would they have to fake the results in post production?'

See the post for a great many details, easily sufficient for any physics teacher to replicate the experiment. The post has many illustrations, including some videos, of the procedures, the equipment, and the results.

The conclusions?

Watts finishes his post with these remarks

'Mr. Gore’s Climate 101 experiment is falsified, and could not work given the equipment he specified. If they actually tried to perform the experiment themselves, perhaps this is why they had to resort to stagecraft in the studio to fake the temperature rise on the split screen thermometers.
The experiment as presented by Al Gore and Bill Nye “the science guy” is a failure, and not representative of the greenhouse effect related to CO2 in our atmosphere. The video as presented, is not only faked in post production, the premise is also false and could never work with the equipment they demonstrated. Even with superior measurement equipment it doesn’t work, but more importantly, it couldn’t work as advertised.

The design failure was the glass cookie jar combined with infrared heat lamps.

Gore FAIL.'

All italics and emboldening in the above have been added by me.

One day, school curricula will include such refutations of shoddy science and exposures of blatant manipulation to assure pupils that 'yes, people really did get up to such tricks back in those days, but we know better now'.

More of this please: in Michigan, a climate textbook removed from schools after errors exposed

2011-10-13T08:45:00.001+01:00

(Hat tip: http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/) Sounds like this book is yet another potboiler, from the vivid school for scary stories, written by someone with no apparent background in science, but who has been so convinced by the outputs of radical environmental groups that she wants to recruit schoolchildren to the cause. Here is a brief description of it:

'A Hot Planet Needs Cool Kids” holds up Al Gore as an “eco-hero;” promotes organizations such as Greenpeace and Rainforest Alliance; urges children to persuade their parents to “Vote Green” and buy organic; cautions against new-home construction, the plastics industry and conventional agriculture, and notes “many people believe that it is best for the earth for families to have no more than one child.” The 88-page book was written by Julie Hall, a resident of Bainbridge, Wash., cofounder of ProgressiveKids, “a planet-friendly” online company, and a poet whose work has been published in The Nation, a liberal magazine.'

The book was criticised by a farmers' group because of serious errors in materials on agriculture.

The book has now has now been recalled, although the people involved still hold by some of the climate materials in it:

Climate change book recalled by Battle Creek Area Math and Science Center

'A week after defending a self-published book on global warming included in their science kits marketed to Michigan school districts, the Battle Creek Area Math and Science Center is now recalling all copies of the book.
“This book makes sweeping statements” unfounded in science, BCAMSC Director Connie Duncan said today. “We want to be sure the information we send out is 100 percent correct to the best of our knowledge.”
The BCAMSC is contacting schools and teachers, via telephone, mail, and the center's secure Website, “any way we could get hold of them,” Duncan said regarding the supplemental texts it included in kits of materials to teach seventh graders the science of climate change.'

As the 'madness of crowds' which has affected so much of society with regard to climate continues to subside, I hope and expect to see much more of this: the long overdue, critical evaluation of textbooks and curricula to identify and remove that which is designed not so much to inform, but rather to recruit.

Climate Change Politics: 'a truly disquieting chapter in recent history'

2011-10-04T09:47:00.001+01:00

For any teacher or administrator, or indeed pupil, wishing to deepen and broaden their general perspective on climate change activism and its consequences would do well to study the insights of Vaclav Klaus. David Henderson has written an excellent essay as part of a tribute to Klaus, and it was posted today at Bishop Hill's site:

Climate Change Issues: The Special Contribution of Vaclav Klaus

David Henderson

1 An established policy consensus
In relation to climate change issues, there is an official policy consensus. That consensus has been firmly in place for over twenty years, and virtually all governments subscribe to it. By way of recent example, paragraph 66 of last year’s G20 Summit Document begins as follows:

‘Addressing the threat of global climate change is an urgent priority for all nations. We reiterate our commitment to take strong and action-oriented measures...’

The measures referred to are chiefly directed towards curbing emissions of (so-called) ‘greenhouse gases’ in general, and carbon dioxide in particular. The policy consensus reflects what I call received opinion; and the core of received opinion is that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) constitutes a serious threat, which however can be contained and partially averted by severely limiting emissions.
The consensus has been increasingly reflected in a wide variety of official actions at local, state, national and international level. In taking these actions, the governments concerned have so far met with widespread public approval.
It is a remarkable fact that, throughout the period since its adoption at the end of the 1980s, the policy consensus has gone without serious political challenge. In the OECD member countries in particular, climate change issues have typically been the subject of close and continuing cross-party agreement, so that policies have been little affected by changes in government. Inside the governmental machine, the policies have had cross-departmental backing, with none of the usual conflicts of interest or differences of opinion.
2 An isolated dissenter
Political leaders across the world have embraced the consensus, and they continue to do so. Within their ranks, however, there has for some years now been a prominent and outspoken dissenter, in the person of Vaclav Klaus.
The position which Klaus has taken on climate change issues is distinctive. In particular:

For several years now, he has given a great deal of thought and attention to the subject. It has become for him a leading (though far from exclusive) preoccupation.
The views that he expresses on the subject are his own. It is unusual for a political leader to stake out publicly a strong personal position on a major issue of policy. Klaus’s readiness to act in this way reflects the strength of his convictions. No element of political calculation enters into those convictions or the way in which he has chosen to express them.
His critique of the policy consensus, and of the arguments on which it rests, forms one element in a wider set of beliefs, a personal philosophy. Klaus is a committed liberal, in the European sense of the term – a classical liberal. In consequence, his assessment of any measure or policy largely depends on what he sees as its implications for the freedom – the personal liberty - of individuals. In the case of current and prospective climate change policies, his main single concern has been with the threat that he sees them as posing to individual freedom and to the market economy which gives expression to it.
Klaus views this threat as extremely serious. He holds that ‘ambitious environmentalism’ has ‘replaced Communism’ as ‘the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity’, in that it ‘wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning of the whole world’. [1]

Given Klaus’s isolation in the political world, and the persistence and intensity with which he has argued his case, it is easy for opponents to class him as both an eccentric and an extremist. Two obvious charges that can be brought against him are

first, that he has become over-preoccupied with climate change issues;
second, that in relation to those issues, and the threat that he sees as arising from consensus thinking and policies, he has taken an extreme and untenable position.

In my view, these charges do not hold. I believe that in his lonely role, as outspoken critic and protester, Klaus has by no means overstated the grounds for concern about the situation of today. From the outset, the treatment of climate change issues by governments has gone badly astray. Both the content of policy and its underlying rationale give grounds for serious concern.
3 The costs and impact of consensus policies
Klaus has strongly emphasised the likely costs and dangers that consensus policies bring with them, and some of those costs and dangers have already materialised. Across the world, measures to curb emissions that are currently in force or in prospect largely take the form of a long and growing list of detailed regulatory initiatives - an array of interventionist gimmicks. These have raised costs unnecessarily, since little regard has been paid to cost-effectiveness; and by creating a host of new opportunities for rent-seeking and lobbying they have brought a further corrupting influence into public life. What is more, they involve a range of intrusions on the freedom of choice of individuals and institutions, opening up multiple new possibilities for what has been well termed ‘micromanaging the lives of people’.
All these effects have emerged already, yet they are no more than a beginning. Far more drastic measures will be required to meet the extraordinarily ambitious goals of consensus policy for reductions in emissions. Among those who endorse the goals, within governments and outside, there are frequent ominous references to the need and scope for individuals, institutions and societies to change their behaviour radically. Two representative instances are:

‘... countries need to act in a concerted fashion to reshape human activities on an unprecedented scale’.
‘Our call is for fundamental transformation and innovation in all spheres and at all scales...’ [2]

I believe that Klaus is justified in his belief that world-wide ‘reshaping’ and ‘transformation’, in the cause of radical ‘decarbonisation’, could be expected to bring coercive and would-be permanent restrictions on individual freedom.
4 Steering the planet

Received opinion points to the need for and feasibility of what Klaus has referred to as ‘global central planning’. It holds that:

changing concentrations of ‘greenhouse gases’, in response to changing rates of emissions, are now the main influence on the climate system of today;
accordingly, the system can be reliably tuned and guided, and what would otherwise be dangerous concentrations avoided, through judicious expertly-directed collective action to control and curb emissions;
in exercising this control the objective, in the form of a safe maximum concentration of ‘greenhouse gases’, is known with close approximation, and
alternative paths to its realisation can be mapped out with confidence.

True, received opinion recognises the possibility that the costs of radical ‘decarbonisation’ could be significant; but it maintains that any such costs are known with confidence to be greatly exceeded (or overshadowed) by what would otherwise be the costs (or risks of disaster) of dangerous global warming: hence the case for far-reaching, concerted and well defined world-wide action has been firmly established. For the indefinite future, then, the constraint of not exceeding the now-identified safe twin maxima, of emissions and concentrations, is taken to be both practicable and binding: in this sense, the right climate change policies are now fixed for ever. Given the necessary political will on the part of governments across the world, supported by enlightened public opinion ready to adopt new modes of living, the planet can be held for good on a safe and prudent course.

To my mind, such beliefs reflect what Klaus has described, in a different but related context, as ‘immodest constructivist ambitions’. It is contrary to all past experience, including experience of failed energy strategies, to presume that governments now know enough about the extraordinarily complex systems involved, and the ways in which these might change, to lay down firm blueprints, and even specific targets, which are to hold good into the indefinite future.

5 The basis of received opinion
How is it that received opinion on climate change issues, and far-reaching policy conclusions arising from it, have won such widespread, continuing, confident and unqualified support, official and unofficial, including endorsement at the highest political levels and by central economic departments of state, over nearly a quarter of a century?
I think the answer is straightforward: it is the shared conviction of all these persons and institutions that ‘the science’ of climate change can now be taken as ‘settled’.
This response provokes the further question: What is the basis of this shared conviction? Here again, I think there is a straightforward answer. Received opinion everywhere reflects, and has throughout accepted and relied on, the scientific advice provided to governments through what I call the official expert advisory process.
That advice can and does come from many sources; but the main single channel for it, indeed the only channel of advice for governments collectively, has been the series of massive and wide-ranging Assessment Reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1990 onwards. The fourth and most recent of these, referred to for short as AR4, was completed and published in 2007. Work on its successor is now well under way.
For more than twenty years, then, governments and international agencies, and a great many outside observers too, have put their trust in the official expert advisory process as a whole and the IPCC process in particular. They are continuing to do so. However, there is now a substantial body of evidence to suggest that their trust is unwarranted.
6 A flawed process
From the start, received opinion has been subject to challenge on many fronts. In part, and predominantly until 2003, the various challenges have been to the correctness of the analysis, and of the inferences drawn from it, which have emerged from the expert advisory process. In recent years, however, a further dimension of challenge has been opened up, in which the critics concerned have questioned the integrity and professionalism of the process, often with implications for the plausibility of specific key results.
The main headings of unprofessional conduct which the critics have noted and documented have been:

over-reliance on in-group peer review procedures which do not serve as a guarantee of quality and do not ensure due disclosure;
serious and continuing failures of archiving and disclosure in relation to peer-reviewed studies which the IPCC and member governments have drawn on;
continuing resistance to disclosure of basic information which reputable journals increasingly insist on as a precondition for acceptance of papers;
basic errors in the handling and interpretation of data, through failure to consult or involve trained statisticians;
failure to take due account of relevant published work which documented the above lapses, while disregarding IPCC criteria for inclusion in the assessment process;
failure to take due note of comments from dissenting critics who took part in the preparation of AR4;
false claims to openness and transparency within the IPCC process;
resisting the disclosure of professional exchanges within the drafting process of AR4, despite the instruction of member governments that IPCC proceedings should be ‘open and transparent’; and last but far from least
failure over the years on the part of the IPCC and its directing circle to acknowledge the above deficiencies, still less to remedy them.

Well-documented exposure of these flaws has come from a number of independent commentators: I would mention particularly, in relation to key chapters in the influential reports from the IPCC’s Working Group I, the outstanding work of Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, and later of David Holland.[3]
In November 2009 an unexpected event gave further substance to what these and other critics of the advisory process had been saying, through the unauthorised release of a mass of emails, data and code from the influential Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Many of the now-exposed exchanges between CRU staff and fellow-scientists elsewhere, all of whom were closely involved in the IPCC process, revealed attitudes and practices which were clearly unprofessional. Among them, two in particular lent further weight to already existing lines of criticism. First, there was a dogged determination, on one false pretext after another, to continue to withhold information that should from the start have been in the public domain. Second, the clear intention was revealed to prevent the publication in scientific journals, and the inclusion in the IPCC process, of pieces of work that cast doubt on received opinion.
The manifest defects in the expert advisory process have gone unacknowledged and unremedied by what I call the environmental policy milieu. This high-level failure, as also the defects themselves, have resulted from chronic and pervasive bias. Right from the start, members of the milieu, and of the IPCC’s directing circle, have been characterised by what has been well termed ‘pre-commitment to the urgency of the climate cause’.

It is not just the environmental policy milieu that is to blame for the mishandling by governments of climate change issues. As a former Treasury official and international civil servant, I have been surprised by the failure of economic departments in OECD member countries to audit the evidence bearing on climate change issues, their uncritical acceptance of the results of a process of inquiry which is so obviously biased and flawed, and their lack of attention to the criticisms of that process which have been voiced by independent outsiders – criticisms which they ought to have been making themselves. A similar lack of resource has characterised the Research Department of the IMF, the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs of the European Commission, and the Economics Department of the OECD. In all these departments and agencies, national and international, there has been a conspicuous failure of due diligence.

7 A missing dimension
In relation to climate change, a fundamental flaw in official thinking and policies across the world, which has hardened with time, lies in treating the main issues as closed. Hence there is a continuing failure to consider and explore an appropriately wide range of possibilities for action.
On the basis of the advice they have been given, governments everywhere have accepted the reality of ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’. As a working assumption, this is understandable. But given (1) the huge uncertainties and unknowns that remain, (2) the high potential costs, and dangers to freedom, from far-reaching mitigation measures, and (3) the serious proven flaws in the expert advisory process and the conduct of climate science, it should not be the end of the matter. The various elements of received opinion should not be taken as embodying revealed and now unassailable truth. Rather, they should be viewed as working assumptions and no more. As such, they should be subject to rigorous and continuing test and review, and it should be a concern of policy to ensure that such testing takes place. Neither the current official policy consensus nor the advice on which it rests should be treated as authoritative or final. The whole notion of a now-settled consensus should be discarded. Governments should promote open exchanges of view and contrasting informed assessments.
In an area where so much is at stake, and so much remains uncertain or even unknown, policies should be evolutionary and adaptive, rather than presumptive as they are now; and their evolution should be linked to a process of inquiry and review which is more thorough, balanced, open and objective than has so far been the case.
8 A disquieting episode
The treatment of climate change issues, across the world and over the past quarter of a century, forms a truly disquieting chapter in recent history. Richard Lindzen has drawn a parallel with the history of eugenics in the last century, and the analogy may prove to have been an apt one.[4]
In part, the story is one of ill-chosen policy initiatives already in place or in prospect. But the current disordered policy mix, though alarming, is symptomatic. A deeper cause for concern is the complex of attitudes, beliefs, presumptions and flawed procedures which have shaped and entered into received opinion, and which now form the officially unchallenged basis for further and far-reaching measures of intervention and control.
In this area of policy, the treatment of risks by governments is dangerously partial and one-sided. Since the late 1980s, attitudes, beliefs and policies world-wide have been fully attuned to the risks of AGW. But there is another side to the coin. A counterpart risk is that humanity is being committed to a costly world-wide collectivist adventure, in which people everywhere will be made not only poorer but less free, on arguments and evidence which are mistakenly treated as final and in a prevailing atmosphere of credulity, bias and intolerance.

In relation to climate change issues, governments in general, and the OECD member governments in particular, have locked themselves into a set of procedures, and an associated way of thinking - in short, a framework – which both reflects and yields over-presumptive conclusions which are weighted towards alarm. They have done so through a worrying combination - of credulity and inadvertence on the part of responsible lay persons, and of chronic bias and professional underperformance on the part of trusted experts and expert bodies. In this whole episode, the capacity of human societies today to arrive at well founded conclusions and decisions has been placed in question. Against this disturbing background, the lone stand of Vaclav Klaus appears as a salutary and much-needed contribution to the climate change debate.

David Henderson was Head of what was then the Economics and Statistics Department of the OECD in Paris. He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, and chairman of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

[1] These quotations are from a newspaper article of 2007. Of Klaus’s many writings on the subject, the main single publication is his book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles, brought out (in its English version) in 2008 in Washington D. C. by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
[2] The first of these two quotations is from an article published in 2008 in the IMF journal Finance and Development by Mohan Munasinghe, then a Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The second is from a 2011 report from the German independent but officially-appointed Scientific Advisory Council on Global Environmental Change. The report is entitled ‘World in Transition: A Social Contract for Sustainability’.
[3] There is an array of possible references here, most of which are on Ross McKitrick’s website. In addition, leading elements in the story are treated in Holland’s article, ‘Bias and Concealment in the IPCC Process’ (Energy and Environment, 2007), and at book length in A. W. Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (Stacey International, 2010). McIntyre’s blog, climateaudit.org, is a notable continuing source of analysis, commentary and debate.
[4] Richard S. Lindzen, ‘Science and Politics: Global Warming and Eugenics’, from R. W. Hahn (Ed.), Risks, Costs and Lives Saved, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Bishop Hill describes the provenance of this essay:
' David Henderson writes:

Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic, recently passed his 70th birthday. To mark the occasion a Festschrift volume has been put together, with a wide range of contributors. I understand that the main topics in the book are: capitalism and the free market; European integration; the euro; climate change issues; and the Czech transformation after 1989.

The English version of the volume has been sent for publication. Meanwhile I have been given clearance to circulate my own contribution, which is herewith attached. It is entitled ‘Climate Change Issues: The Special Contribution of Vaclav Klaus’.

Welsh Schools to be sent a 'Scare them Witless' pack on Climate

2011-09-21T11:26:00.003+01:00

Leo Hickman in a Guardian blog (hat tip Justin Ert) has alerted his readers to a new danger facing children in Welsh schools: scaremongering climate propaganda developed:

'...during 2011 as a result of being awarded funding from the Beacons Programme (an engagement fund supported by Cardiff University, University of Glamorgan, BBC Wales and Techniquest).'

Here is the front cover of their materials:

Notice the central pictures, enlarged below:

What were they thinking? 'This should get their attention'? 'This should scare them witless'? 'This should help get us even more funding'?

The above document can be downloaded from here.

I want to find time to go through this document in detail. In the meantime, I note this nonsense from page 7:
“Greenhouse Effect”
The sun shines down on the surface
of the earth. About half the heat
naturally reflects back out into space.
When greenhouse gases such as
carbon dioxide and methane are
released into our atmosphere, they
trap heat and stop it reflecting back
out into space. This causes additional
warming of the earth surface,
ocean and atmosphere… just like a
greenhouse!
Now of course it has long been established that this not how a greenhouse works - so the grand conclusion is nonsense.
Furthermore, the gases do not 'trap' heat and stop it getting back to space, nor is the infra-red radiation involved reflected from the Earth so much as generated by it - so the third sentence is also wrong. The second sentence is also wrong, if by 'heat' they mean the solar input - the Earth's albedo is more like 0.3 and of course all the energy received from the sun and absorbed by the earth is in fact re-emitted. Only the first sentence survives:

'The sun shines down on the surface of the earth.'

Even that is a bit of an over-simplification since at any time half of the earth does not have the sun shining down on it.

My preliminary study of this document is not at all encouraging. It does seem intended to produce alarm. Alarm that is not, in my view, justified. If this initital impression is confirmed further, then I will be sure to accuse the authors of gross irresponsibility, of dereliction of their basic duty as adults to protect the young from scaremongering.

Note added 26 October 2011. Mostlharmless has more criticisms of the Cardiff Concoction here: http://mostlyharmless-room-101.blogspot.com/2011/09/education-or-muddled-disinformation-and.html#more
I am still hoping to find time to work through the materials, but so much else is going on just now.

Candid Calor's Climatological Confessions

2011-09-16T17:23:00.001+01:00

An insightful interview of a Dr Calor reported by Dr Briggs (Hat tip: http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/) Hot stuff. This could be a breakthrough for providing insight into the previously more mysterious thought processes of climatologists. Perhaps the less virtual of them might see something of their own 'reality' here? The words of Burns spring to mind:

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An' foolish notion
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us
An' ev'n Devotion

Here is an extract from the interview:

'But satellites don’t directly measure temperature. Isn’t it so that they measure radiation and through a physical-statistical algorithm estimate temperature?
This is natural, yes.
This implies that there is uncertainty in that estimate: another plus and minus. Do you account for that in your estimates?
These satellites are calibrated by very complicated computers, a very expensive process. We are confident in the data they produce.
Taken in all, we are as sure as we are about anything that the temperature has increased a few tenths of a degree and that most of this increase is due to the activity of mankind.
How do we know that?
We build very beautiful, extraordinarily complex computer models which prove this. Although they are difficult to fully comprehend, at base they are very simple.
We know that carbon dioxide captures heat in the lower reaches of the atmosphere. The more CO₂ there is, the more heat captured. We also know that a doubling of pre-industrial levels of CO₂ will only raise the temperature an insignificant amount. Yes?
So we build into these models a feedback mechanism that says as more CO₂ is added, the temperature increases non-linearly. We then run these models and we find exactly what we expected to see: increasing CO₂ leads to a positive feedback in temperature!
But aren’t you just seeing what you put into the model? It’s not quite an independent verification of the theory.
You forget that we also have evidence that these models have produced simulations that look, after some processing, like actual observations. That should be enough proof that our theory is correct.
Perhaps. But aren’t there literally hundreds of knobs and dials that you need to tweak to “tune” the models so that they first produce those simulations? Do you have independent evidence that these models predicted new data better than predictions based on the assumption that your theory is wrong?
Look here, young man. I hope you are not going to take the denialist position. If we don’t do something now, by the time we confirm everything, it may be too late.
You can’t argue with that. Thank you for talking to us, Dr Calor.'

Albert Gore: how much harm can one man do?

2011-09-14T11:02:00.001+01:00

Today sees some kind of last-ditch fundraising effort by Al Gore, a profoundly unpleasant man whose movie, 'An Inconvenient Truth' is full of untruths and should never in a month of Sundays have been issued to schools in the UK. The harm from it must include the needless and shameless frightening of children, and probably a great many teachers as well. Further harm will arise from the misleading information presented. Further harm will come from the cynicism about science and politics and teachers that must follow as the nonsense about climate is, as is happening almost daily, more widely exposed for what it is: non-sense. Harmful nonsense that has helped bring about increased famine through bio-fuels, increased energy prices through windfarms and the like, increased pollution through relocation of industries, and general distortion of the commerical and political 'marketplace' through excessive and sometime corrupting obsessions with 'carbon'.

But amidst all this gloom and the ongoing tawdry schemings of 'environmentalists' such as Gore, we have some sparks of humour to help cheer us up. Please visit Bishop Hill's site to see more of Josh's cartoon series to mark this day:

Talking Points for Discerning Pupils Faced with CO2 Alarmism in the Classroom

2011-09-13T17:56:00.001+01:00

One of the ways in which the facile alarmism about CO2 being pushed at and within schools can be undermined is for the more able pupils to raise discussion points during classes. A recent article in the Canada Free Press site gives a few good questions which look well worth trying. See the original article here to get background and backup on each of the questions. (hat tip: http://antigreen.blogspot.com/)

How do you explain that global temperatures according to UN data have not increased since 1998 and there has been no significant warming since 1995?

Are you aware that even the UN IPCC does not consider climate models to be “predictions” or “forecasts” but merely emission scenarios?

Are you aware of multiple scientific studies showing the medieval warm period (before SUV’s and human emissions) to be warmer than current temps?

How do you explain that CO2 levels have been much higher in the Earth’s history, but have not coincided with human or animal extinction?

Can you explain why Greenland has cooled since the late 1930’s and 1940’s?

Can you explain why Antarctic sea ice has expanded to record levels in recent years?

Are you aware that Arctic Sea ice has EXPANDED in 2008?

Are you aware of the multiple peer-reviewed studies blaming Arctic sea ice reductions on many factors not related to man-made carbon emissions?

Are you aware that the Earth is currently in one of the coolest periods in its geologic history?

Are you aware that a recent U.S. Senate report features more than 500 scientists dissenting from man-made climate fears—more than 10 times the number (52) of UN IPCC scientists who signed off on alarmist (and media hyped) Summary for PolicyMakers in 2007.

Are you aware that many solar scientists and geologists are now warning of a possible coming global cooling?

How do you explain that an analysis in peer-reviewed journal found COLD PERIODS – not warm periods [..were associated with the greatest climate-related disasters such as major floods, and droughts] ?

How do you explain the recent U.S. government report which found Hurricanes declining, NO increases in drought, tornados, thunderstorms, heat-waves?

Memorable lyric: 'people whom we should be ruling must fear global warming. '

2011-08-29T11:34:00.001+01:00

I must apologise to any remaining readers for the dearth of posts. I have been a bit unwell for many weeks, but I seem to be back on the mend now and hope to be able to do more soon. In the meantime, here is a song well-worth listening to:

What Shall We Do with the Missing Data?

Credits

Words by Deadman Turner.

Lyrics

How shall we deal with egregious errors?
How can we spread more alarmist terrors?
What could we fake to create a scare as
good as global warming?
man-made global warming
faking man-made global warming.

Soon your power must be dearer;
Armageddon is much nearer;
evidence, we say, is clearer
for that global warming.

Now it seems the weather’s cooling;
numbers drop of those we’re fooling;
people whom we should be ruling
must fear global warming.

Dr. Jones is now quite shaken,
feeling that he’s cooked his bacon;
maybe he was just mistaken
over global warming.

What shall we do with the missing data?
How shall we hide all the graphs’ stigmata?
How shall we keep all our fees pro rata
while we fake world warming?
man-made global warming
faking man-made global warming.

Oh, dear, no, the seas aren’t rising;
powercos though are downsizing;
stop those sceptics analysing
man-made global warming!

We must keep the mob from waking;
hide how much that we were taking;
Mann and Jones et Al. were faking
man-made global warming.

Quench the opposition fires;
all who disagree are liars;
we’ll defame those bad deniers
of our global warming.

What shall we do with the evil-doers?
What shall we do with the peer-reviewers?
What shall we do with corrupting CRUers
faking global warming?
man-made global warming
faking man-made global warming.

Looks and sounds like it is from Australia, a land where the tide may well be turning against climate hysteria thanks to some foolish legislation in the offing to impose a 'carbon tax'.

Source, and link play the song aloud: http://www.mp3.com.au/Forms/MediaView.aspx?MediaId=146975

Hat-tip: 'Deadman' posting on 'Unthreaded' at Bishop Hill on 27 August, 4:12PM.

A sensible perspective on climate just published: an essay accessible to teachers of all subjects

2011-08-17T18:47:00.002+01:00

The torrent of alarmism about CO2 and climate variation has swept teachers, as well as politicians and many of the general public, into positions of de facto compliance and collaboration with a new dogma. Some (and may their numbers increase faster than the upturned blade of an ice-hockey stick) are of course questioning this force-fed diet and associated actions which they have been assured are urgent and essential to 'save the planet'.

Where might such a teacher go to formulate or deepen their own perspective on climate? Few would care to dive into the world of the complex computer programs at the heart of the alarmism. Few are in a position to dispute with those who assert a scientific consensus, or more specific appeals to authority. Yet they can all study expository, tutorial, and explanatory materials written by experts in relevant fields, and reflect on the credibility, consistency, coherence, verifiability and tone of them.

One such piece has been published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation:

'The Truth About Greenhouse Gases'

by William Happer, the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University.

The essay begins with a quote from the Madness of Crowds:

“The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. This contemporary “climate crusade” has much in common with the medieval crusades Mackay describes, with true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types, and even children’s crusades.'

The whole essay can be downloaded as a pdf here: http://www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/happer-the_truth_about_greenhouse_gases.pdf

Note added 21 Sep 2011: Lubus Motl has fisked, and exposed as unimpressive, an attempt to discredit Happer's essay. Poor MacCracken - he may be a 'fat cat alarmist', but he is pretty thin when it comes to intellect and integrity.