Christmas Greetings

A Merry Christmas to all people of goodwill everywhere, especially those special few who drop in here!

My apologies again for the light blogging.  My ambition for 2011 is to help find and promote antidotes for the poisonous alarm, and negative, destructive thinking deliberately injected into schools all over the world under the guise of 'environmentalism' by those using 'climate change' as the terror of choice to win attention and compliance from the young.

And, when it comes, a Happy New Year to one and all!

Only bourgeois science compares facts with predictions - our revolutionary climate science cares not for such trifles

"A SCIENTIFIC THEORY is judged by its predictive powers. Bah. Comrades, we must distinguish between mere bourgeois science, which is concerned with sterile facts and predictions, and Revolutionary Science, which is concerned with what will promote the Revolution."

Headline in Instapundit , 20th December 2010.


The now notorious talk of snow in the UK becoming so rare that children would not experience it is looking a little foolish now that we have had two snowy winters in a row, especially since increased snowfall and colder winters were expected by others, not obsessed with CO2 at the expense of everything else, who noted solar and other cycles pointed towards a colder period due in the northern hemisphere.  Even the roughly 30 years patterns of minor warming and cooling we saw in the 20th century superimposed on the otherwise fairly steady warming observed since the early to mid 19th century, point to a cooler spell.  These past two years, and the ironic coolings at the IPCC conferences in Copenhagen and Cancun, do not disprove the alarmist case, but they ought to weaken it and encourage more attention, and more funding, for those outside the very prosperous  'CO2 dominates the climate' camp. For example, this research.

The powerline blog expresses it thus:


'But snow isn't all bad. Those British kids who were never supposed to know the joys of sledding, skating and, above all, snowball fighting are in luck:

'It's fun to ridicule the warmists because they are so often wrong, but their errors are in fact significant: a scientific theory that implies predictions that turn out to be wrong, is false. A principal feature of climate hysteria is its proponents' unwillingness to be judged by the standards that govern real science.'

Donna Laframboise has dug out some of the absurdly confident assertions of the IPCC with regard to what we were going to experience thanks to global warming:

 'the 2007 climate bible written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It told us that winters would be warmer and less extreme. I invite you to take a look for yourself. This table is titled Temperature-Related Phenomenon and appears on a page titled: Some Unifying Themes. The table contains phrases such as:

• more frequent heat waves / hot spells in summer
• more warm and fewer cold nights
• fewer frost days
• fewer cold outbreaks; fewer, shorter, less intense cold spells / cold extremes in winter [bold added]

Across from those phrases, on a case-by-case basis, the IPCC tells us these phenomenon are either “likely” or “very likely.” So, for example, the IPCC said it was very likely that we’d experience fewer below-freezing days everywhere in the world. We were further assured that all of the IPCC’s climate models are in agreement on that point.
Similarly, George Monbiot’s 2006 book was titled Heat. Its subtitle was not: How to Stop the Planet from Freezing. Rather, it insisted the planet was in danger of burning. A year earlier, in a Guardian newspaper column, Monbiot told readers that “The freezes this country suffered in 1982 and 1963 are…unlikely to recur.”
As the final two weeks of 2010 count down, reality is not being kind to these prognosticators. Instead of sugar dustings of snow and mild temperatures, many parts of the world are in the grip of another unusually harsh winter:

• new record-low temperatures are being set in a variety of locales, including:  Cuba, China, Japan, the UK, Kentucky, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina
• snow and ice are stranding motorists in their cars in: Italy, China, the UK, Canada, and Indiana
• snow is interrupting air travel across Europe (more here with great pics)
• communities are coping with unusual amounts of snow from Helsinki to New York, from Minnesota to the UK
• people are dying of hypothermia in many parts of the US, including some unlikely ones: South Carolina, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin
• wildlife is being adversely affected by the cold in the UK as well as in Florida (more here)

In the UK a recent newspaper headline read: Millions facing fuel rationing over Christmas as heating oil runs low. In one of the world’s wealthiest countries some households face a four-week-long wait for furnace oil shipments, and the price has nearly doubled. Rather than being warm and comfortable, many people will spend their holidays cold and miserable – not to mention worried that their water pipes might freeze and burst (more here). Meanwhile, a women’s World Cup skiing event has been postponed due to too much snow in France.
Although the mass media barely mentioned this fact, it’s more than a little ironic that the Mexican resort town of Cancun broke cold weather temperature records six days running during the United Nations’ anti-global-warming summit earlier this month.
We’ve long been advised that the symptoms of climate change are all around us – and that global warming is happening faster than predicted. But Mother Nature, it seems, has a wicked sense of humour.
.
In related news, I love this headline on yesterday’s Christopher Booker column in the UK Telegraph: It’s ‘the hottest year on record’, as long as you don’t take its temperature
Back in January I wrote a lengthy blog post examining snowfall in Britain over the past decade. In the year 2000 the Independent newspaper interviewed climate scientists and then advised the public that soon children wouldn’t know what snow was. Global warming would result in “not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.” I examined every one of Britain’s winters since the year 2000, however, and found no shortage of the white stuff.'


Elsewhere, we hear of climate alarmists responding to the snow up to their ears to assert that that is exactly what we should, now, expect from global warming.  In fact, that is just what we should, now, expect from global warmists.

Wallchart materials: waxing hot and cold, climate scares 1895-2009

 The AGW climate scare is notable in that it has been vigorously adopted by the left, under the guise of caring for the environment, in a way which reflects their transition from being in favour of industrial progress to being against it, and from being concerned with the 'working man' to being convinced the planet would be better off without 'him'.

Here is a post from a couple of years ago on the butnowyouknow blog that I think would make interesting reading for any youngsters startled or scared by the AGW alarmism, and perhaps encourage them to dig into it a little more deeply, while refusing to be intimidated by the clamour in the meantime:

'

• 1895 - Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again – New York Times, February 1895
• 1902 - “Disappearing Glaciers…deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation…scientific fact…surely disappearing.” – Los Angeles Times
• 1912 - Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age – New York Times, October 1912
• 1923 - “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” – Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, – Chicago Tribune
• 1923 - “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” – Washington Post
• 1924 - MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age – New York Times, Sept 18, 1924
• 1929 - “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer” – Los Angeles Times, in Is another ice age coming?
• 1932 - “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age” – The Atlantic magazine, This Cold, Cold World
• 1933 - America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise – New York Times, March 27th, 1933
• 1933 – “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather…Is our climate changing?” – Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”
• 1938 - Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.”– Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
• 1938 - “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise…Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades” – Chicago Tribune
• 1939 - “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right… weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer” – Washington Post
• 1952 - “…we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century” – New York Times, August 10th, 1962
• 1954 - “…winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” – U.S. News and World Report
• 1954 - Climate – the Heat May Be Off – Fortune Magazine
• 1959 - “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” – New York Times
• 1969 - “…the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” – New York Times, February 20th, 1969
• 1969 – “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ — Paul Ehrlich (while he now predicts doom from global warming, this quote only gets honorable mention, as he was talking about his crazy fear of overpopulation)
• 1970 - “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post
• 1974 - Global cooling for the past forty years – Time Magazine
• 1974 - “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” – Washington Post
• 1974 - “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” – Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
• 1974 - “…the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence” – New York Times
Cassandras are becoming
increasingly apprehensive,
for the weather
aberrations they are
studying may be the
harbinger of another
ice age
• 1975 - Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable – New York Times, May 21st, 1975
• 1975 - “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine
• 1976 - “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” – U.S. News and World Report
• 1981 - Global Warming – “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” – New York Times
• 1988 - I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that thegreenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. – Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, see His later quote and His superior’s objection for context
• 1989 -”On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Discover magazine, October 1989
• 1990 - “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” – Senator Timothy Wirth
• 1993 - “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” – U.S. News and World Report
• 1998 - No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” —Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
• 2001 - “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” – Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001
• 2003 - Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration” – Jim Hansen, NASA Global Warming activist, Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb?, 2003
• 2006 - “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” — Al Gore, Grist magazine, May 2006
• Now: The global mean temperature has fallen for four years in a row, which is why you stopped hearing details about the actual global temperature, even while they carry on about taxing you to deal with it…how long before they start predicting an ice age?

The actual Global Warming Advocates' chart, overlayed on the "climate change" hysterics of the past 120 years. Not only is it clear that they take any change and claim it's going to go on forever and kill everyone, but notice that they even sometimes get the short-term trend wrong...

Worse still, notice that in 1933 they claim global warming has been going on for 25 years…the entire 25 years they were saying we were entering an ice age. And in 1974, they say there has been global cooling for 40 years…the entire time of which they’d been claiming the earth was getting hotter! Of course NOW they are talking about the earth “warming for the past century”, again ignoring that they spent much of that century claiming we were entering an ice age.
The fact is that the mean temperature of the planet is, and should be, always wavering up or down, a bit, because this is a natural world, not a climate-controlled office. So there will always be some silly bureaucrat, in his air-conditioned ivory tower, who looks at which way it’s going right now, draws up a chart as if this is permanant, realizes how much fear can increase his funding, and proclaims doom for all of humanity.

• 2006 – “It is not a debate over whether the earth has been warming over the past century. The earth is always warming or cooling, at least a few tenths of a degree…” — Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT
• 2006 – “What we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes. It is always…warming or cooling, it’s never stable. And if it were stable, it would actually be interesting scientifically because it would be the first time for four and a half billion years.” —Philip Stott, emeritus professor of bio-geography at the University of London
• 2006 - “Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930′s the media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920′s until the 1960′s they warned of global warming. From the 1950′s until the 1970′s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.” – Senator James Inhofe, Monday, September 25, 2006
• 2007- “I gave a talk recently (on fallacies of global warming) and three members of the Canadian government, the environmental cabinet, came up afterwards and said, ‘We agree with you, but it’s not worth our jobs to say anything.’ So what’s being created is a huge industry with billions of dollars of government money and people’s jobs dependent on it.” – Dr. Tim Ball, Coast-to-Coast, Feb 6, 2007
• 2008 – “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress” – Dr. John S. Theon, retired Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA, see above for Hansen quotes

Next time you see the usual "global warming" chart, look carefully: it is in tiny fractions of one degree. The ENTIRE global warming is less than six tenths of one degree. Here is the Global Warming Advocates' own chart, rendered in actual degrees like sane people use. I was going to use 0-100 like a thermometer, but you end up with almost a flat line, so I HELPED the Climate Change side by making the temperature range much narrower, and the chart needlessly tall to stretch the up-down differences in the line.'

This site illustrated their report of the above timeline with this graphic:

It would make an interesting project for a class to start collecting ice-age/cooling scare stories from the media since 2008. 

Noted added 30 Sep 2012: cooling scare gets a mention herein a CAGW-trumpeting paper: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/30/ice-age-human-survival-alice-roberts?newsfeed=true


Note added 25 March 2013.  There have been quite a few such stories.  Here is a 'new ic age coming' one from Germany:  http://notrickszone.com/2013/03/25/flagship-daily-die-welt-stuns-germany-scientists-warn-of-ice-age-cites-new-peer-reviewed-russian-study/ 
' For example veteran journalist at German flagship daily Die Welt today has stunned the rest of the German mainstream media with a piece titled Scientists warn of ice age.'

Note added 30 March 2013.  In the UK press: http://www.express.co.uk/news/science-technology/387971/Scientist-predicts-earth-is-heading-for-another-Ice-Age

Note added 28 June 2013.  I'm not sure about the veracity of the Time magazine covers shown above.  This, though, is real from January 31st 1977:

as is this one from 24 Dec 1979:

Source: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19791224,00.html

Good set of links on the cooling scare of the 1970s: http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html

(h/t: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/6/28/greenpeaces-desperate-smear.html)

Note added 09 August 2013.  Here's another little ice age ahead story, this time in a Danish paper: http://notrickszone.com/2013/08/09/major-danish-daily-warns-globe-may-be-on-path-to-little-ice-age-much-colder-winters-dramatic-consequences/

Background for teachers: smear-tactics against critics of CO2-alarmism

The logical legerdemain of 'appeal to authority' is widely used by scaremongers about CO2 in the air, and is easily spotted (e.g. 'the IPCC says...', as if the IPCC were worthy of trust!, or the appallingly misleading '97% of climate scientists agree...', as if a self-selected tiny-minority response to an obscure questionnaire had inductive merit).  Perhaps less obvious, if more unpleasant, are the smear tactics to discredit 'opponents' (for the alarmist are waging a battle, as they solipsistically see it).  A blogger called Russell Cook has collected examples of this , and has written several essays to draw attention to them:

http://www.globalwarmingskeptics.info/thread-1939-post-11632.html#pid11632

Examples of his output, these ones all being published on American Thinker:

• "The Lack of Climate Skeptics on PBS's 'NewsHour' " The first piece I wrote when I began looking into this situation, online December 29, 2009
• "Smearing Global Warming Skeptics" July 6, 2010, my first detailing the myriad problems with the Gelbspan / Ozone Action accusation of skeptic scientists
• "The Left and Its Talking Points" July 29, 2010, about the 'JournoList' similarity of the accusation, and a quantification of the bias against skeptic scientists at the PBS NewsHour
• "The iceberg treatment" August 10, 2010, on Rep Ed Markey's "Deniersberg", and the lack of answers from the PBS NewsHour
• "Pelosi funding accusation about mosque the same tactic used against..." August 20, 2010, about how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's call to investigate protesters of the Ground Zero NYC mosque is thought by some to be a good tactic
• "Silencing global warming critics" August 26, 2010, the Union of Concerned Scientists' new efforts to create an intimidation system against certain journalists, contrasted with their 1998 efforts to thwart the petition of skeptic scientists
• "Warmist Slander of Scientific Skeptics" September 15, 2010, where Jane Mayer's New Yorker article about the Koch Brothers isn't a new exposé, but is instead has elements tied to the same single accusation originating with Gelbspan / Ozone Action
• "The Curious History of 'Global Climate Disruption' " October 04, 2010, on John Holdren's and Jane Lubchenco's 1997 ties to Ozone Action
• "Supreme Court to Hear Global Warming Case" December 8, 2010, describing how a lawyer in one of the global warming nuisance cases tie into this entire skeptic smear situations 

And his latest one there :http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/12/the_case_of_the_curious_climat.html


An extract:

'Untold numbers of well-informed individuals are rolling their eyes about how all the ‘warming planet' warnings abysmally failing to happen, like low lying islands swamped by rising seas, more frequent and intense hurricanes, and the Arctic starting down the path of being ice-free in the summer -- a process less likely to happen since the big ice cube up there keeps getting bigger each winter.

Eyes roll, but tough questions aren't being asked about the origins of faith-based organizations' climate change concerns, so those ideas are allowed to spread, ultimately corrupting a perfectly unsuspecting Advent season.

The question is: what prompts this faith-based concern about an essentially political issue?

The USA Today article says,

Many of the 10,000 congregations involved in Interfaith Power and Light have joined a Carbon Covenant...

Click on the link for "Carbon Covenant" at the article's page and you are taken to the Interfaith Power and Light web page. Click on IP&L's Resources link and continue to their "Building" page, and the #2 link is for a PDF file of "Bottom Line Ministries that Matter: Congregational Stewardship with Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy Technologies" by the National Council of Churches' Eco-Justice Program. A handy online version of that PDF file shows it was prepared by Matthew Anderson-Stembridge and Phil D. Radford, with absolutely no reference of who they both are.'

Cook goes on to explain just who they are, and it makes for an interesting read.

Global Warming Brainwashing: "Our children have been lied to their entire lives"

Thanks be to American Thinker for publishing this:


December 15, 2010

"Global warming brainwashing

Carol Headrick

It's freezing.  Our kids have been lied to their entire lives. 

Step outside and ask yourself if billions of your tax dollars were well spent on Global Warming.  What if the amount is in the trillions?  Generations of American children have grown up being taught the dangers of man-made global warming.  On just one day, my twelve year old son heard about global warming in his science class, his Planet Earth video in English class, and in the Green Ideas in his school newspaper.  It comes close to being brain-washed.  Many teachers are also brain-washed.  They too have been taught that the science behind global warming is settled.  Our teachers need to be introduced to Climategate.  Simple words will spell it out.  The data was manipulated and made up, facts omitted, disagreements silenced.  Pass this on to our children.  They have been lied to their whole lives and deserve better. 

The great Global Warming Scientists were and are still well-funded and continue this farce.  The latest name is Global Climate Disruption.  We have been lied to and continue to be lied to.  We should not only be mad but demand that anyone participating in this fraud be prosecuted.  Any funding should immediately be ceased.  Thinking Americans should research Global Warming for themselves.  The worst part is finding out why.  But most of all, I want our children to grow up to be thinkers. "

"We're not scared anymore Mr Gore." An inspired cartoon story from 2008.

You can get your copy here: http://www.users.on.net/~kerryandmarc/not%20scared%20anymore%20Mr%20Gore%20EE.pdf

 The story shows Mr Gore being welcomed to a classroom, making some of his points, with each of them being refuted by the children.  Eventually, Mr Gore flees. 

Some background on the author:

'Marc Hendrickx has worked as a geologist since completing a BSc (Hons) at Latrobe University, Australia in 1993. His work has included making geological maps for government geological surveys in the Victorian Alps, the deserts of central Australia and in the dry plains of Western New South Wales. Since 2001 he has worked as an engineering geologist specialising in transport infrastructure. At the time of writing he was undertaking a PhD at Macquarie University.  As a geologist Marc sees the effects of natural climate change written into the rock record every time he steps onto an outcrop. He doesn’t need a computer model to tell him the climate’s changing.  The path to a sustainable future will not be born from fear.  Open your eyes and set yourself free.'

More here: http://littleskepticpress.blogspot.com/

Note added 16 Sep 2013: the above link to get a pdf copy of the storybook no longer works.  You can see a fairly clunky version on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW9_RkHlz2Q

Weather agencies as Trojan horses. Radical meteorology! Lousy forecasts!

Tim Ball has created an interesting hypothesis: that weather agencies, such as the UK Met Office, were deliberately targeted to be Trojan horses for alarmism around CO2.  From there, the schools and the children and their teachers must have looked like sitting ducks.  They were.

Climate Distortions Were Achieved. National Weather Agencies Are The Trojan Horses

Extract:

'Maurice Strong set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to provide a powerful vehicle for almost complete control of climate science. Each national weather office perpetuates the deception that human CO2 is causing climate change. He controlled the science through the IPCC and the political and propaganda portion under the umbrella of the Rio Conference (1992) and the ongoing Conference of the Parties (COP). By peopling the IPCC with representatives of national weather offices, he attained control of the politics within each nation and collective global control. They’re the Trojan Horses  from which funding and research emanate to deceive the politicians and public into achieving his goal of destroying the industrialized nations.'

The article ends with:

'Maurice Strong built the Trojan Horses around material provided by national weather agencies. Too many scientists and bureaucrats were willing carpenters complicit in the construction and operation. Some of the cladding has been pulled off, but the skeleton remains. National weather agencies continue controlling the IPCC and all climate issues. They also continue to fail miserably with their forecasts. Despite millions spent on a new computer the UKMO predicted a mild winter and were quickly proved completely wrong. They were equally wrong in previous winter and summer forecasts with cheaper computers. They did the IPCC ‘trick’ by saying they don’t do long term forecasts, they are “outlooks”. Environment Canada has similar spectacular failures for which they invent 1984 type newspeak. A Globe and Mail headline last week announced, Environment Canada admits to ‘underforecasting’ snow by 1,000 per cent. The Trojan horse’s all have broken legs; it is time to put them down.'

I fail to see how you can 'put down' a weather agency.  But a root and branch reform, with new leaders and more freedom to follow science rather than ideology would be a good thing.  Perhaps if they just went back to weather forecasting, free from biased-models, that would suffice.

Meanwhile, in our schools the tragedy of misinforming and frightening the children will go on. 

Honest climate science from NASA? Looks like it!

The primary 'forcings' (by which I think they mean the most influential factors) in the climate system do not include CO2!!  Has the home of Drama Queen Hansen been hacked into that such sense as this should be found on its website?

'The Sun is the primary forcing of Earth's climate system. Sunlight warms our world. Sunlight drives atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns. Sunlight powers the process of photosynthesis that plants need to grow. Sunlight causes convection which carries warmth and water vapor up into the sky where clouds form and bring rain. In short, the Sun drives almost every aspect of our world's climate system and makes possible life as we know it. 

Earth's orbit around and orientation toward the Sun change over spans of many thousands of years. In turn, these changing "orbital mechanics" force climate to change because they change where and how much sunlight reaches Earth. (Please see for more details.) Thus, changing Earth's exposure to sunlight forces climate to change. According to scientists' models of Earth's orbit and orientation toward the Sun indicate that our world should be just beginning to enter a new period of cooling -- perhaps the next ice age. 

However, a new force for change has arisen: humans. After the industrial revolution, humans introduced increasing amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and changed the surface of the landscape to an extent great enough to influence climate on local and global scales. By driving up carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (by about 30 percent), humans have increased its capacity to trap warmth near the surface. 

Other important forcings of Earth's climate system include such "variables" as clouds, airborne particulate matter, and surface brightness. Each of these varying features of Earth's environment has the capacity to exceed the warming influence of greenhouse gases and cause our world to cool. For example, increased cloudiness would give more shade to the surface while reflecting more sunlight back to space. Increased airborne particles (or "aerosols") would scatter and reflect more sunlight back to space, thereby cooling the surface. Major volcanic eruptions (such as that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1992) can inject so much aerosol into the atmosphere that, as it spreads around the globe, it reduces sunlight and cause Earth to cool. Likewise, increasing the surface area of highly reflective surface types, such as ice sheets, reflects greater amounts of sunlight back to space and causes Earth to cool.
Scientists are using NASA satellites to monitor all of the aforementioned forcings of Earth's climate system to better understand how they are changing over time, and how any changes in them affect climate.'

See for yourself here:  http://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/big-questions/what-are-the-primary-causes-of-the-earth-system-variability/


Hat tip: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/12/climate_change_its_the_sun_stu.html

They thrived in the fear they created: 1972, and the fatuous 'Blueprint for Survival'

Donna Laframboise has written a very informative essay about the 'Blueprint for Survival' published way back in 1972.  This, along with the similarly fatuous 'Limits to Growth' published in the same year and Ehrlich's 'Population Bomb' published a little earlier, was the output of a handful of rich and poorly-informed, weak on science, weak on economics, weak on history, weak on humanity, men in the West, claiming to be desperately anxious about the future of humanity.  Laframboise has identified a very influential subset: the Drama Queen Scientist.  They live in the wealthy West, they have enought money, enough security, but what they lack is sufficient publicity.  They discovered that scaring people witless was a pretty good way to get it. 

 Some extracts (my italics) from the essay:

'The 34 distinguished biologists, ecologists, doctors, and economists who endorsed the Blueprint are accountable to no one. If such people started making decisions regarding economics, public health, transportation, and other matters we’d be exchanging representative democracy for tyranny on the part of these select experts. We’d be saying that a small number of people know better than we do what is best for us and our children.
I think that’s bunk. I also think it’s important to note that some experts are drama queens. For them, the glass is always half empty and everything is always a crisis (rather than a manageable problem). Unfortunately, drama queens tend to attract media attention. We therefore need to start noticing that, no matter what the specific problem has been, drama queen scientists have been pushing the same unpalatable solutions for 40 years:  fewer humans, less consumption, less travel – and less freedom.'

...

'The past 40 years bear little resemblance to the horror story the drama queens were predicting back in 1972. Average people are now richer and healthier. They live longer lives and many enjoy access to more food, culture, and technology than did the princes of old. In much of the world the air and water is cleaner than it was in the 1970s, and the forests are larger. As books such as Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist patiently explain, the planet is not headed to hell in a handcart. Things are far from perfect, but the current situation looks nothing like the collapse predicted by the Blueprint 40 years ago.'

...

'When I read the Blueprint I’m reminded of Soviet Communist Party literature prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Communists also thought they were building a better world. They thought they could alter human nature and that, if they only planned carefully enough, a prosperous and harmonious society would transpire. Communist party publications, I might add, were characterized by the same pompous, judgmental tone.
The Communist reality, however, was a disaster. Which means that before I’m willing to place my trust in anyone else’s utopian fantasies they’ll need to spend an awful lot of time explaining what they’ve learned not to do based on their careful study of the Soviet and Chinese debacles. Quick tip: let’s start with how many independent safeguards will ensure that millions of souls cannot be starved or murdered by their own government.
Drama queens inhabit a fear-filled world – one that’s dangerously unpredictable and in which some small matter can trigger the apocalypse. They have little faith in their own ability to cope, in humanity, or in the future. No matter how many good things have happened, they insist on identifying the flaw in every apple. They are a personality type – and they are a part of our collective humanity.
But a world that permits that part of us to determine the future is a world in which the future may, indeed, turn out to be bleak.'

How many senior teachers, heads, etc were students in the early 1970s and were influenced by the fluent balderdash of the Blueprint or the Limits or the P-Bomb?  How many of our current politicians, and senior civil servants, and media managers, were also victims of them?  Can we suppose part of the astonishing success of the IPCC-spin on climate is due to such influences?  Can we find ways to protect future generations from them?

Something for the classroom wall - cartoons by Josh to get them thinking (and laughing)

Source, and contact details for permissions: http://cartoonsbyjosh.com/

Also showing at good blog sites near you, e.g.

http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2010/12/10/josh-62.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/10/friday-funny-the-new-and-improved-4-legged-agw-table/

Heroic teachers can get classroom cheers by telling the truth about climate

Climate Depot has added to an earlier compilation of scientific dissenters from the party line on climate, that shameful orthodoxy we have been force-fed by a largely docile or even collaborating media who can see their own advantage in it, be it sales ('fear' sells), or be it political patronage or even thinly-veiled campaigning for socialism (that creed which caused so much misery and suffering in the 20th century).

That's an important post, well worth keeping for reference, but I want to highlight 2 of the comments posted under a report on it at WUWT because they had me smiling with good cheer at my desk.  One of them reported their class cheering too as they heard their teacher dismantling the CAGW nonsense.  Here they are:

(1) Jenn Oates says:

December 8, 2010 at 10:27 pm

A few years ago I got an email from a furious parent because I told her daughter that AGW was a hoax and that it was all politics, not science. The parent lambasted me for my weather/climate unit, and told me that I ought to be ashamed of myself for trying to brainwash my students and start teaching science, and keep out of politics (I had mentioned our friend Al). I replied that she was wrong, AGW was not real, and that since I taught science I would not be perpetuating a scientific hoax in my classroom. It’d be like teaching that Piltdown Man was an actual human ancestor–not gonna do it.

Now that the hoax is finally falling apart to the point where even the masses are hearing about it, I’d sure like for her to apologize. :)

(2) Andy says:

December 9, 2010 at 12:02 am

Jenn Oates says:
December 8 2010 at 10:27pm

I’ve had a similar experience Jenn. I’m a maths teacher in a London secondary school (11-18 years). During one of my lessons a child mentioned AGW, so I decide to explain to the class why I thought the theory was complete rubbish and showed them some graphs (eg graphs that show MWP, logarithmic effect of CO2, etc) to explain why. I’m not exaggerating when I say the kids actually cheered!
Anyway, the next day the Head of Science came to see me in the staff room and told me to stop telling the kids about my ‘conspiracy theories’.
The graphs are now stuck on the wall of my classroom for all to see! ;)

Cartoons for the classroom: a little humour to reduce the sting of climate alarmism

If the curriculum is alarmist, a pupil who questions it may lose marks, and a teacher who questions it may lose their job.  I face neither of those risks, and I hope that somewhere there are teachers and schools where that is also the case.  There may be opportunities in most schools through debating societies and suchlike to share radical views about climate, radical only because the establishment position is so dogmatic, loaded, and anti-scientific.  But the 'radical' view really ought to be the ordinary, unremarkable one: climate varies, some of the variations give us severe problems on various space and time scales, our forecasting ability for climate is very modest, our computer models of it are laughable in the face of great complexity, and our observations of temperatures, ice, precipitation, hurricanes, sea levels, etc etc show nothing at all extraordinary has been happening in recent times to what we see and experience.

The cartoons by Josh on climate have both great charm, and great penetration into some of the issues and personalities involved, and could enhance discussions and presentations on climate in our schools.  Here are two recent ones:

For many more, and for background on each, see: http://cartoonsbyjosh.com/

Please note his conditions for use:

'The cartoons are my copyright but feel free to link to this page
or to post the cartoons on non-commercial blogs with attribution (cartoonsbyjosh.com).
If you want to use any of them in a printed or on-line journal, newspaper
or any other publication, or use them in connection with any for-profit business
or usage then please email me at josh at cartoonsbyjosh.com for higher res versions, permissions, rates and so on.'   

10-Minute Trainers: 129 of them on shoddy science, politicised institutions, and more!

There are now 129 'gates' in the list published at the 'No Tricks Zone' site.  If only we had not had to endure so many scientific, PR, and political tricks about climate and CO2 for the past 25 years or so!  Anyway, some of the awfulness is captured by this list, and each and every one could be developed into an informative '10-minute trainer' ready for use in the classroom at the drop of a hat (10-minute trainers were developed in Japanese manufacturing companies to make good use of any unscheduled downtime in production - teachers can use them to make good use of any unscheduled opportunities to step outside the indoctrination curricula on climate currently being imposed by diktat in many countries).

Here are the first 12, to whet appetites anywhere where free thinkers are thinking:

1. NEW! 1010-gate (aka Splatter-gate) NoTricksZone and media silence (NoTricksZone) and Pachauri sensitize children (NoTricksZone and media bias (WUWT). Hate, intolerance, and violence are embedded in the psyche of the environmental movement, as the following promo video illustrates.


2. Acceleration of sea level rise-gate (Appinsys) and here (Ecotretas)
Claims of accelerating sea level rise are misleading.
3. African agriculture claim-gate (WUWT)
IPCC wrongly claims that in some African countries yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020.
4. AIT-gate (SPPI) and British High Court (Telegraph)
35 errors or gross exaggerations are found in Al Gore’s Oscar winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
5. Alaskan glaciers-gate (Science Daily)
Loss of glaciers in Alaska was grossly exaggerated.
6. Amazon rainforest-gate (WUWT) and here (eureferendum) and here (C. Booker)
IPCC cites “robust” source: green activist organisation WWF. WWF’s source was merely an anonymous brief on forest fire risks posted in 1999 and taken down four years later.
7. NEW! American Physical Society-gate (GWPF) and Hal Lewis resigns (WUWT).
Distinguished physicist Hal Lewis resigns from APS due to it’s departure from science and adoption of dogma.
8. Antarctic sea ice-gate (WUWT)
Antarctic sea ice underestimated by 50%.
9. Authoritarian science-gate (American.com)
The science says… Science is increasingly used as an instrument of authority to impose public policy.
10.Australia-gate Jo Nova and here (climategate.com) and here (WUWT)
Australia temperature adjusted upwards to show more warming.
11. NEW! Australia brushfire-gate (SMH) and here (greenwatchamerica blog).
Green restrictions, not global warming, caused 300 deaths in Australian 2009 bushfires.
12. Bangladeshgate (AFP)
IPCC inflates Bangladesh doomsday forecasts in 2007 4AR.

See them all here: http://notrickszone.com/2010/12/07/climate-science-scandals-list-of-gates-balloons-to-129/

10-minute trainer: IPCC spin exposed very clearly. Again.

The remarkable success of the IPCC is due in some part to the simple, emphatic messages it imparts to the media, and seeks to incoporate in 'summaries for policy makers'.  These gloss over, ignore, or even contradict the reservations expressed even by those scientists who participate in the various working groups.  Thus, the scientists hang on to some integrity, where their papers recognise uncertainties, or distinguish between observational data, and the output of speculative computer models. Meanwhile, the political activists get what they want - dramatic headlines, and a headlong rush to push policy-making at breakneck speeds.

Donna Lamframboise has reported on one recent instance of this, captured by a writer from the New York Times, a famously leftwing paper not at all hostile to the IPCC, exposing the blatant error in this UN press release:

'UN press release makes the same mistake Revkin talks about

Andrew Revkin, who blogs about climate change for the New York Times, is doing what an experienced beat reporter is supposed to: he’s paying close attention. In a post filed from the Cancun climate summit, Revkin notes that a draft document currently being circulated by the United Nations contains a mistake.
The document lists some basic, agreed-upon climate change facts on page four. The third point, Revkin reports, currently says that the document

3. Recognizes that warming of the climate system, as a consequence of human activity, is unequivocal, as assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change [IPCC] in its Fourth Assessment Report;

Revkin correctly points out that this statement is false. In his words:

The only major conclusion of the climate panel that is described as “unequivocal” is that the climate has warmed.'

A nice illustration for any class discussion on the nature and intentions of the IPCC.  This is by no means the only instance of this sort of thing.  It supports the contention that the de facto role of the IPCC is to generate severe alarm about human influence on climate, largely via the implausible hypothesis that CO2 is a major driver of climate.  Yet many might have reasonably have assumed that the role was to critically review and summarise what is known about the causes and consequences of climate variation.  No such luck!

Background reading - helping us, and our discussions, stay civil on climate

I will not be able to do much on this blog for about another month or so, but in the meantime I hope to keep things ticking over by relaying pieces from other sources.  The essay below is by Donna Lamframboise, and although I have much sympathy for Tim Ball's reaction to the provocations of those pushing alarm about CO2, I think Donna has provided good guidance here:

---

Appalling Rhetoric from a Climate Skeptic

November 26, 2010

I’ve never met Tim Ball, a retired climatology professor and vocal climate change skeptic. I think he comes across well in this video, and I’ve heard others say he’s a good and decent man. I must confess, though, that I stopped reading his regular posts at Canada Free Press some time ago because I consider his rhetoric over-the-top.
If scientists don’t choose their words carefully when they make social and political arguments, it causes me to worry that they haven’t been as rigorous as they should be when arriving at their scientific judgments. In my view, way too many scientists (and others) have taken up hardline positions on either side of the climate change line. From there they hurl insults at each another. Sense and virtue can only be found on their side. Those people over there are deliberate liars. They’re stupid, corrupt, fraudulent, deceptive, manipulative, and self-interested.
In some respects, I’m a typical member of the public. I didn’t take any university-level science courses. Therefore, if someone stands up at the front of the room and points at graphs, refers to scientific theorems, and jots down formulas, my head begins to swim. I’m not equipped to follow the conversation. I don’t speak that language. Everything sounds plausible to me. Which means – and I know this is going to be distressing for some people to hear – I cannot be persuaded solely by a discussion of the science.
I, like many people, decide who I believe based on the strength of their logic, on their demeanor, on how they respond when challenged. Do they behave professionally – or do they lash out with venom and contempt? The individuals whom I find persuasive act like grownups – not not like adolescents intent on scoring meaningless points in a video game.
Freeman Dyson, who is a gifted writer as well as an eminent physicist, describes science as “a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions” (page 3). That makes a lot of sense to me. There are numerous scientific disciplines, numerous ways of looking at the physical world. Two scientists from different disciplines might well examine the same question and come to conflicting conclusions. I’m OK with the notion that they both might be partially right.
So when an ethics professor at Penn State U argued last month that corporations that advance skeptical climate arguments are guilty of crimes against humanity I was deeply offended. And when climate skeptic Ball argued yesterday that proponents of human-caused climate change theory are similarly guilty of crimes against humanity I was equally appalled.
Crimes against humanity are nothing to joke about. Mass graves, intentionally inflicted famine, gas chambers, barbarous violence – those horrors should not be spoken of lightly. If everything is a crime against humanity, then nothing is.
Climate change is a complex matter – and no one knows what the future holds. If the proponents of human-caused catastrophic climate change are right, climate skeptics may indeed have blood on our hands because we may well have impeded effective responses. (I don’t really believe this since I’ve yet to be persuaded that emissions reduction would actually accomplish anything. But for the sake of argument, I’m willing to grant this possibility.)
If climate skeptics are correct, however, and emissions reduction seriously undermines the well-being of national economies then far more people will lead pinched, restricted, poverty-stricken lives. Infant mortality will rise. Food (which is grown with fossil-fueled farm equipment and transported in fossil-fueled trucks) will become more expensive. There is no way, given the current state of our technology, to dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions while still keeping the hospitals running, the schools heated, and anywhere near the same number of people employed. The math simply doesn’t work. Environmental activist George Monbiot isn’t kidding when he says:

The campaign against climate change is an odd one. Unlike almost all the public protests which have preceded it, it is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. [bold added, p. 215]

Because the climate change debate is so important, because so many lives (not to mention trillions of dollars) hang in the balance, we need open, vigorous debate. We need to hear all perspectives.
I want the proponents of AGW to make their case. I want the skeptics to make theirs. I want the lukewarmers and those occupying the agnostic middle ground to have their say. Only from this symphony of discussion, from this multitude of perspectives, will trustworthy knowledge emerge and genuine understanding evolve.
But this free and open discourse cannot happen when both sides are trying to shut down the debate by labeling other people’s views criminal.

Another straw in the wind - here is a teacher who has had enough of 'climate porn'

Bishop Hill has extracted this comment posted below a piece in the Daily Telegraph (a piece written by their WWF Spokesperson Louise Gray):

"This article is the last straw. For six years I have had to bit my tongue while force-feeding this climate anthropogenic global warming nonsense into the increasingly sceptical minds of my science school learners. They all know it's a scam. I know it's a scam. They all know that we will be notionally 1010ed if we don't all toe the party line, give the "government approved" answer in the exams, fill in the approved plans, but carry on as normal. I cannot seriously go into a school next term and carry on like this.

Consequently I hereby declare that, metaphorically, the next parent, head of science, head teacher, school governor, local education authority jobsworth, central government apparatchik, or UK energy minister who tells me have to teach this climate porn to under-16s or lose my job will be kebabed on a hockey stick and fed to the polar bear packs currently massing under my window seeking warmth. And any kid who dares to submit an assignment consisting of material cut'n'pasted from these Louise Gray's WWF press releases will be spreadeagled on a stationary wind turbine in the North Sea.

I call upon all teachers to join me in this declaration, and to organise a welcome back party to all UK attendees from Cancun"

And in the comments beneath the Bishop's post, a commenter called Trefor Jones writes:

"I concur totally with the sentiment. During the latter years of my long career as a head of geography I became totally disillussioned with the nonsense that I was supposed to teach and examine. The students, staff members ( apart from the young and ambitious) privately shared the doubts, especially mathematics teachers who understood that you cannot predict a chaotic system. It came to a head when I ignored an opportunity to take a group of children to see "An Inconvenient Truth", and was promptly sent a copy of this eco-nonsense by courier directly to my classroom. Unfortunately, following a very nasty accident I have had to finish teaching. However, I do not miss the climate change elements of the course which had morphed over the past decade from geography to environmnetally inaccurate propaganda. The Green lobby which has invaded so many of our national institutions are in my eyes nothing less than rather dangerous totalitarian fascists."

 And 'JohnOfEnfield' also appears again (see my previous post) with this comment:

"Yipee!
From my own experience: -
1. Teachers are beginning to coach children on this rather than just spout the propaganda. "What is the most common gas in the atmosphere?", "CO2, it is a toxic gas Miss". "What does toxic mean?". ...."So CO2 is NOT toxic then?". etc.
2. Head of sixth form "I can't get teachers to teach this c**p!".
And I thought I was a lone voice, crying in the wilderness."

Hope and change spring eternal!